Time for a New Blog

September 17, 2011 blog

I finally got tired enough of dealing with WordPress’s admin interface and writing posts in HTML to do something about it, and I’ve redone this here blog. Now it’s all blogofile. I can edit in markdown and preview locally. All of my content is backed up just by pushing it to github.

It also got a facelift in the process.

The new design

The old design was based around a 500 pixel column with 14 pixel text. As resolutions have grown, that started to look tiny. Now it’s 640 pixels wide using a 16 pixel body font. Like the old site, the new one is designed to rigidly adhere to a baseline grid. This time, the grid is 24 pixels tall.

I’m using the Google Font API to go beyond the half dozen safe webfonts, but just barely. Titles are using Varela Round, but should fallback to Georgia and look OK if it’s missing.

The old design was a classic two column layout. This time around, I went with a single column. The entire site is now 640 pixels wide, almost like I was designing in 1998! I pushed all of the navigation down to the bottom.

Two reasons: First, when reading a post I wanted to remove as much clutter as possible. I wanted it to feel like reading a book without some constellation of navigation and social buttons in your peripheral vision vying for your attention.

And I figured a narrower layout would be more mobile friendly. On my phone, I think the new design looks pretty nice.

Since this was more or less redoing things from scratch, I probably broke some stuff. Let me know if you see something busted. In the meantime, I can get back to actually writing about stuff again!