Some Design Attention

Holy crap has the last month flown by. I had some busy patches, but I’ll try to get back to posting more often. I have a few ideas lined up so look for stuff soon. To point out my blogging inconsistencies is not the purpose of this post. Rather, it is to say that I finally ripped out the “stock” simpla theme I was using and did something myself. To be honest, the reason I kind of stopped blogging was because I was so sick of the old look. It was so unrewarding to post something and then be annoyed with the site’s styles. I’m sure this freshen up will reinvigorate me to write.

The Updates

I typically leave colors to the “pros” like my business partner, Steve, so this is mostly shades of grey. That said, I really like the type (Lucida Grande, popular with Apple) and spacing. I’m a big fan of minimalist design. I finally added gravatar into the mix on comments as well.

On top of the aesthetic, I also swapped out some behind the scenes stuff. I upgraded to Mephisto 0.8 and Capistrano 2 (yeah, it’s been that long since I’ve deployed here). I also switched scm’s, from subversion to git. As if that wouldn’t be enough, I changed the app server to mod_rails.

There is a lot more I want to do with Railstips both functional and design wise, but I’m forcing myself to get Harmony operational first. Oh, and I haven’t been totally dormant in regards to blogging. I’ve posted a few things over at Ordered List.

The Issues

The feed is not redirecting to Feedburner. If you are seeing this, then you are subscribed to the feedburner feed and if you aren’t seeing this, you will in a few days when I get stuff sorted out.

If you see any other oddities, just shoot me an email with the page having issues and what browser you are using.

7 Comments

Nate Klaiber
Oct 13, 2008

My favorite part is the visitor counter. Nice.

I like the minimalist look, things are neat, tidy, and the appropriate amount of whitespace makes things separated and readable.
John Nunemaker
Oct 13, 2008

@Nate – Ha, yeah that was in the last version of the site but it wasn’t as noticeable. It cracks me up so I leave it.
Elijah Miller
Oct 13, 2008

Less is more! Looks good, especially the counter from err.
Elijah Miller
Oct 13, 2008

“I also switched scm’s, from git to subversion.”

Really? You poor bastard! :)
John Nunemaker
Oct 13, 2008

@Elijah – Ha. Wow. Yeah, that “typo” has now been fixed. What can I say, it was late…
Infakta
Oct 19, 2008

Why did you change app server to mod_rails?
The memory usage is similiar…
John Nunemaker
Oct 19, 2008

@Infakta – This site is actually still hosted on Dreamhost because I’m too lazy/haven’t had time to move it. It was running on FCGI which sucks, thus mod_rails is an upgrade.