Doubling down

Recently I read a post by Frank Chimero and I felt the same way. I would like my one home on the internet to have all the things I am doing on it. As a start towards this, I have redone my site again and I too am doubling down on my personal site. This is the beginning of that effort.

As you can see, the design got stripped way down. I am more interested in words and writing than I am in the design of the site. I guess working on a writing tool and with writers is rubbing off on me. Also, since I’m not a designer, I decided to just use some great fonts and leave it at that. Working with a type nut helps a lot in pointing me in the direction of good fonts.

With the design being so simple, I had very little need for floats, so I decided to use flexbox for the few cases where I needed side-by-side layout. I realize this means that on some browsers, the layout isn’t perfect (Opera and iOS6 are the main offenders), but the reality is that most people come directly to a post, read it, and leave; so I’m OK with the index page and the portfolio page looking a little off for some. I also wanted to dig deeper into flexbox and actually use it in a real site, so this was a perfect opportunity.

In addition to using a new layout system, I also added a category of links. This is my place to track things I’ve read that I really like and not have to rely on another service for it. It’s still a small category, but it is started and I’m excited about having all this in my own site from now on.

What’s next? Well, the design will probably evolve a bit here and there, but the main thing I would like to do is figure out how to do my own photo galleries on this site. I currently use Flickr and I love a lot of things about the site, but it is changing a lot lately and I am not sure all of the changes are good for users. In order to make sure that my photos remain available the way I would like to share them, I want them on this site. I’ve found a plugin for Jekyll (what I use for this site) to do galleries and I will most likely also do photo posts. But that is still to come.