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.

maintenance overdue

I will be reformatting and updating the main server this weekend. It has been pretty well neglected for the past few months as I have just had different priorities. With this change, I will be able to scratch off a few things from my TODO list that have been sitting there for a while. I also want to use this opportunity to reinforce the security on the system. Hopefully the system will only be down for a blip of time (I am hoping for under an hour) but I will also be moving over to using nginx as I have used it personally on my local machines and really like it.

In this migration, I will be abandoning (finally) the Django codebase and using the Jekyll code entirely. This means that this post, along with a number of other new posts, will be popping up for a lot of people all of a sudden. So, hi!

Kim is going back for Grand Prix this weekend to see some friends, I opted to stay home and get stuff done since I have put off a number of things for longer than I would like. I hope to tidy up the kitchen, update my server and possibly my desktop, I also have wanted to make this recipe for a while but have never had the chunk of time to work on it. I will probably try and spend Sunday going through the old code and hammer in some of the stuff and open source all of it.

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.