Redesign

I haven’t allowed myself to redesign my blog in a long time, in the past I’d spend ages carefully designing templates that only got used for two posts before being abandoned.

I feel I’ve finally earned a redesign.

Let me explain it to you in mind-numbing detail.

Colours

You’ll notice the blog actually looks pretty much the same. This might seem like “branding” (said in the most pretentious design-school voice you can affect) - but it’s really just that I quite liked the colour scheme I had going. Done.

Update

So, it turns out the above was a lie, and what I really wanted was brighter colours, bolder lines, and ajaxy-ness.

Layout

The second thing you may notice is that it’s wider - much wider. The narrowness of my blog remained through a great many of my previous designs, primarily to trick you all into thinking I’d written more than I had, and to trick myself into thinking I was writing a lot. Now I have a much more reasonable line-length and therefore nicer typography. Yay.

Engine

The third thing you won’t notice is that I’ve switched from using Toto on Heroku to using Octopress on Github Pages. I made this switch because Toto seems dead, Heroku is slow unless you pay them too much, Octopress was recommended by my workmates, and Github is fast and free.

Circles

I really really like circles (don’t ever get me started on the Japanese flag). So my blog has circles now because they makes me unreasonably happy. Sometimes that’s all the design rationale you need.

I stole them wholesale from Acko.net - a blog design I love but I promise not to emulate more than this (I don’t think I could: go look).

One-post-per-page

Before I had all of the posts on the / page. Now I just have the latest one. The primary reason I changed this was to make you all click the new circle previous & next buttons. I am not even kidding.

Also it feels more focused having the one post - my blog’s topics are pretty eclectic.

Archive

I have an archive now!

URLs

I removed the date! I never liked having the date in the URLs - it prevents them from being timeless. However, I’m redirecting old URLs using javascript, so by making them appear more timeless, I’ve broken the link with the past. Pun.

Comments

Will return. I just don’t want the Disqus interface muddying up my beautiful design any longer.

update

Have returned! I’m now using Juvia - an open source, ruby-on-rails commenting system, which I’m hosting on Heroku, that means I can have 10,000 comments for free, so comment lots everyone. Juvia is leagues better than Disqus for me - it’s open-sourceness means I was able to modify the API to work exactly how I wanted, after hours of fruitless fighting with Disqus.
I now need to clean up my code and make a couple of pull-requests for Juvia - my Disqus migrator and a more json-ly api. Open Source Rocks!