subDimension

New Design for 2013

My website has a new design this week. I liked the simplicity of my old design, but I felt a little constrained by it. The width made me feel pressured to only post long articles, I’d like to be able to post twitter-style updates from time-to-time and I felt that they would look lost. The new design gives everything its own little box and I think this gives me more flexibility. My intention is to make a few small tweaks to my blogging engine over the next week or so to facilitate different kinds of posts.

The design is not so much inspired by my GitHub profile page as it is a complete rip-off. I really like the layout, the sidebar with the avatar communicates the ownership of the writing here. I hope they don’t mind too much. There are still a few little bugs to work out, so things might look a bit wonky whilst I work through them all. I’m not sure how the monospace font comes across, but I spend most of my free time looking at code, so again, I think it communicates a little of my personality.

In preparation for my new design, I was perusing the Internet Archive. I was trying to get a feel for the last couple of designs I’d had. Unfortunately, the Way Back Machine hadn’t archived any of my old style sheets, so I just got text. What they had archived though was a batch of old blog posts that I no-longer had! I spent a few hours copying and pasting the content into text-files and those posts are now preserved here. Reading through a few of them I was struck by just how poor I was (still am?) at writing and how I really didn’t know what to write about. I think I’ve found my voice a little more over the last year or so, writing about developing the things I make. I don’t need to worry about awkward opinions looking strange 3 years from now. I leave the posts as they were, aside from a few notes about things that have disappeared since I wrote about them.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of my posts start in exactly the same way, which often sounds a bit odd, so I’m going to work on that this year! I found a few tips on opening sentences, so I have somewhere to start!