Jeff

New new design

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.

deployment and stuff

So I am at a point where this site is ready to be deployed. I will probably get around to it this weekend, I still need to run my migration script on the production instance of the Django codebase. I will probably have a number of random things to do with the styles (I threw together the gallery stuff today). There are some kinks in the flickr integration as well. I also lack a fallback style when moving to smaller devices (tablets/phones). But overall I am happy with it. I may retroactively add some of the half written posts I did on the train (I also need to add some posts about my vacation, I closed the browser on the one I had half written, heck, maybe today on the train!).

I want to actually get my CI bot up to a usable state so I can dogfood it with some of my side projects. I will also probably make the old site’s code public now that I don’t have to worry about my of my bad security holes to be abused. I may try to get my father to move to flickr for his photos (could write a simple migration app to move them over to flickr from the db, hrmmm, challenge accepted!) for his birthday or christmas (early probably). So enough with the technology/programming blabber, time for a quick update on my life.

First, two weeks ago was my yearly review for work. It went well, I have some things to work on (I may write a post about some of it later) and will get another year to try and make those improvements. This past weekend, I wrote up the ‘alpha’ frontend of the gamification system for work. There are a lot of issues and kinks that I need to iron out, but it is in a dogfood state. I hope to open source it at some point (I wrote it with the plan to at least). In the end, only two commits out of the total of NOTE were not made by me. I am kind of dissappointed in the lack of interest everyone else had in the project. I know that I will get some negative feedback on what I have elected to do in some areas and it will be hard to swallow due to the feelings I have for what is mostly my own project. It will be a hard pill to swallow. My friend Devin (also the best man in my wedding) has gotten a job offer up in this area, so in a few weeks, he will be staying with us for a while as he starts his job and looks for a place to live. It will be awesome having him nearby to go see stuff and hang out. But I will need to get used to someone staying with us for a while (similar to the inlaws staying with us for a week).

Wow, that was a big dump of information, hopefully I will be able to parse out the bigger parts and write proper posts on them.

new design

So I redesigned the site, if you can’t already tell. I also have migrated from my moldy old Django backend to a static site generator that I started using because of it’s integration with GitHub (where I store most of my side coding). I have made a number of changes with this (and done a few things that I had always lied to myself that I would get around to doing). I am now using flickr to hold all of my pictures, this then crawls that every so often and generates a gallery page for that. I have added disqus comments to select posts (I can dictate this on a post by post basis).

In regards to the design, I stuck with my usual philosophy of minimalism. I don’t like incorporating images or crazy lining up of things to achieve a crazy effect. In this, the major design piece is the “word wall” that sits behind everything. This gets generated on every page load from a set of ‘categories’ that I have defined in the javascript file, these words are randomly added to each row and are set to highlight when the corresponding link on the left is hovered over. (Go ahead, try it, hover over any of them, watch the background). I am still tweaking the whole system, trying to get the effect to be pleasing without overbearing or being missed. I also want to cover the text itself so you can’t accidently highlight it.

I want to have this work on various devices too. I have tried it before with my programming log and have mixed success. I also have basically forgotten tweaking that since I got it up. As always, though, I will continue to use this as an experimenting ground for stuff I want to try. Ideally, I will get this working with one of my side projects to have it update on demand.