So I rolled a new design a few months ago, but I have been pretty unhappy with it since. It just felt very… kiddy. I like light on dark for personal things, but the look of it on a public website just felt almost naive. That feeling, along with some new things I had heard while at a conference in San Francisco (that post is in the works still), I spent my flight home writing the majority of the design. And then today, I roll it out.
I went with an almost class newspaper sort of look. I use classic aesthetics in the main print and try to limit the craziness to as little as possible. The styles are very tied to modern browsers (so if it looks like crap, either switch to the latest Chrome or wait for me to eventually add in the legacy detection and support). It should also be very responsive (a lot of that work was done when I worked on my programming blog design) so it should scale nicely down to mobile devices, but the detection for those could be borked. There are, again, no images used in the site design (of course there are pictures in the gallery, which does have the stuff from San Francisco, those actually were uploaded while I was still on the trip, more on that in a bit), I need to do some optimizations on how the page loads still, but it should also load fairly fast (the font loading blocks rendering, should defer loading those until the page is rendered or see about some class change to trigger that. Whatever, those are details I will work out in time.
The pictures from my trip I uploaded to flickr while still on the trip. It was an experiment to see how well it worked and what sort of issues I had. The only real problem I experienced was the slow upload speeds (hotel lobby wifi is going to be like that). The real issue is that the server doesn’t have any system that auto recompiles all of the pages unless I tell it to. I will be trying a few ways to try and automate this, so the site will update regularly, whether I like it or not.