Being a programmer, and one who mainly developers for the web at that, I have been embarrassed by my previous web presence. You see, I bought an off-the-shelf content management system with very nicely designed, but rigid templates, and used it to build my previous website. The software I used, Rapidweaver, is a great product. It is just not for a web programmer like myself for which the underlying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side scripting used to build a personal website are as much expressions of personal creativity as the words that you are reading now. My greatest fear was that a professional colleague would view source and see less-than-ideal markup! Or worse, a potential client would look at the site and judge my programming merit on the fact I didn’t even put together my own personal website using my own code.
So a few days ago I set out to re-build my personal website. What you are reading now is the foundation for the new website. I am not much of a designer. But I wanted to do the design myself because I want to get better at it. I felt that the best way to tackle the design would be to reduce the number of potential design variables to a bare minimum. I picked up a book on typography a while ago and so I scanned its pages and decided that most of the design of my website would come from typography. Because there are only a dozen or so web-safe fonts, choosing what fonts to use was fairly simple. Thus, the design boiled down to layout, font sizing, and colours. I like the new look.
In designing the new website I wanted the user experience to be well done, and as of now, it is almost where I want it to be. One of the things that I implemented in the new design is newspaper-style columns for blog posts. Coupled with larger type, I hope that they make reading some of the lengthier blog posts a much easier task. The newspaper-style columns are generated on-the-fly by a JavaScript so if you do not see them, you likely have JavaScript turned off. The JavaScript should be compatible across a wide range of browsers; it has even been tested to work spectacularly on the iPhone.
Navigating the blog posts is about half way to where I want it to be. Hopefully you will notice the friendlier URLs. Don’t worry if, for some reason, you have an older post bookmarked. They are being seamlessly HTTP 302 redirected to the new versions of the page. My DRM Rogers rant proved to be quite popular on Google so I wanted to make sure the link did not die! You browse posts by their tags, and once I have some time I will put together a UI for navigating chronologically. Until then, you can twiddle the URL to browse for posts in a certain year, month, or day. For example, the URL http://www.43n79w.com/blog/2007 shows all posts in 2007. The URL http://www.43n79w.com/blog/2007/12 shows all the posts in December 2007. Not surprisingly, the URL http://www.43n79w.com/blog/2007/12/9 shows all posts on December 9, 2007.
I tend to read Reddit, Digg, and a few other link aggregators quite religiously. Consequently. this next feature may be redundant for many people who do the same. Bu,t there is a cool links callout that contains various links that I find interesting and timely. I am going to be putting together a JavaScript bookmarklet for myself that will allow me to update this callout more frequently and easily. But for now, there are a few funny and/or interesting links on there. If you’re a geek, and haven’t heard of XKCD, what are you waiting for?
The last goal I had in mind for this particular release is performance. Should one of my blog posts get Dugg, I want to put up a fighting effort of keeping my ISP’s server afloat. As such, a primitive but very effective full page cache is being kept. As I improve the website and add more features, it will be more difficult to maintain a full page cache. But for now, it works like a charm and I suspect it could withstand quite a beating (aren’t these the famous last words of a Dugg/Slashdotted website?).
In any event, I hope you enjoy the new site. More content will be coming online in the near future including software projects and more frequent blog posts.