April 07, 2008

Finally

Hi blog readers. If you haven’t already, click on through to the site. You’ll see some changes, I promise.

So I’ve redesigned, finally. I promised myself I wouldn’t tell a long story of the trials and tribulations of how I came to this design. Just know that I actually started doing some IA work on it about a year ago and then it dropped off the radar for about a year, and picked it back up in February of this year.

The goal here was to keep it fairly simple. I wanted the content to stand out and come first. Frankly, I’ve never been a fan of the heavily styled blogs. While they are “pretty”, there is a threshold where a blog loses its utility and becomes more of a piece of art. For some, I guess that is the point, but to each his own.

Right now, it’s a bit rough around the edges. I have a long list of known issues that I put off because I felt were not show stoppers like:

• It doesn’t look great in IE6. I’m debating whether I’ll even attempt to dumb down my markup and CSS for the inferior browser.
• HTML may not validate, if you care about such trivial things.
• Search doesn’t work. I have a whopping 13 posts, so I think you’ll live. If that’s not good enough, here’s Google.
• Tidying and refactoring of some of the code.

Why Simplelog?

I wanted to stick with a blog application that ran on ruby on rails. My reason is twofold: As a rails noob, I wanted something I could hack on and get my hands dirty, and even though Simplelog development has stagnated as of late, I still felt the UI is simpler and has less cruft than Mephisto, which seems to be the ruby on rails blog application front-runner.

Thanks

Thanks to Robby Russell for the help on all the random development and deployment issues I was having, and to Andy Delcambre for helping me getting this beast up and running.