Mark Two

Hi there. It’s been a while.

I took a year off from blogging. That wasn’t intentional. I just didn’t have anything to say for a while. Then I did have something to say, but I was tired of how the website looked. If the design doesn’t excite me I tend not to want to blog. (Call me vain, but I want my words to look good.) And redesigning the website – well, that requires an entirely different set of motivations to tackle. It took me some time to get that motivation, and then before I knew it we were here: 10 days short of a year.

During the development process I referred to this design as “mark two”, as it was the second idea I tried out.

The website still runs on Django. The blog is still powered by Vellum, my personal blog application. I’ve been hacking in it for over a year now (even when this website was inactive) and it is much improved since the last time I mentioned it. In the past six months I’ve seen the light of CSS preprocessors. All of the styling for this design is written in SASS and uses the excellent Compass framework. The responsive layout is built with Susy.

If you’re interested in these technical details, you will also be interested to know that the entire website is now open-source. You can find it on GitHub. Fork it, hack it, or borrow some of my CSS for your website.

The other big news is that I have begun to categorize blog posts. Yeah, it’s 2012 and I’m a little late to the party on that one. You may recall that I only began to tag posts in 2008. As it stands right now, all posts are just placed in the great big ameba of a category called “General”. Eventually, they will all have more meaningful categories – I hope. But it will be a while.

Things ought to be more active around here for the foreseeable future.