Moved

It's been a long while since I've posted here. For a long time I didn't feel like I had anything interesting to say, but recently I've had the itch to write up a few things I've been working on and link to some interesting projects I've come across. But I couldn't bear to keep using wordpress any longer—wordpress (and wordpress.com) are actually pretty great at what they do, but I'm the kind of person who writes blog posts in markdown in a text editor. In addition, I was already running a machine in the Rackspace cloud for ZNC, and I didn't feel like paying wordpress to customize my theme or to remove ads. So I switched to Jekyll which just feels like a much better blogging platform for someone like me.

About the Design

I'm not a designer by trade, so I opted for a minimal approach with the design. Luckily, minimal designs are pretty good for reading text, which is presumably what you're here to do. There's a whole crop of software these days designed to remove the busy features (or malfeatures) of a page and let you focus on the text and traditionally reading-focused apps, such as RSS readers, have been getting the minimal treatment as well. Reeder, instapaper, readability, and Safari's "reader" feature are good examples of the "just the text" aesthetic that inspired the design.

To actually put the site together, I started with the HTM5 Boilerplate, and removed the stuff I didn't need. A nice benefit of doing it this way is that the site looks pretty good in mobile safari automatically. Unless you do front-end HTML work all the time, I'd recommend using the commented version of the boilerplate—there's a ton of links to interesting articles about web page optimization, cross-browser compatibility, and the like in the comments.

Under Construction

Of course, the downside of switching from a relatively heavyweight blogging platform to something minimal like Jekyll is that you lose a lot of features you used to get for free. Most of them—tags, categories, etc.—I can live without, but there's a few basics, such as having a list of all of the articles, that I really should have. So I'll keep evolving the design as I go along. The great thing about having a blogging platform I can iterate on is that any mediocre aspect of the site is just an afternoon's worth of work away from being great.