Redesign

May 14, 2014

I was preparing a longer redesign for a while. A lot of my energy was spent writing about web typography and I realized that I was seriously unhappy with the typography on this site. When I went to change it I then remembered that I had no deployment workflow in place to deploy the changes from my local site to the master branch of my repo on Github.

That led me into a tailspin and I tried a lot of things, like Capistrano (which I didn’t understand), then git-ftp (but that had to be done manually, and that’s no good), then FTPloy (which didn’t work). I couldn’t SSH on to my server because I bought cheap hosting because I didn’t know what I was buying.

When I finally got it up on the live server, I logged into Wordpress to sit down to write and I felt claustrophobic with the WYSIWYG editor and their Jetpack markdown plugin didn’t help a lot.

Jekyll seemed like a better option all around. It’s hosted entirely on Github Pages and deployments happen within 10 minutes of pushing your commits to Github. It’s done entirely in Markdown and there’s hosting to worry about.

More About the Redesign

I’ve teased a little bit of this on Dribbble. I was inspired a lot by antique pictures of people practicing archery. Notably there’s a lot from the 1908 London Olympics that I just loved.

I used Flexbox throughout this site as an experiment and there’s some kinks to work out but I’m really happy about it. I switched from Bourbon to handling vendor prefixes to using Autoprefixer and obviously I ditched Bourbon Neat for Flexbox.

I’m using a fair amount of inline SVGs but I’m really only getting started there.

Where This is Going

SVG, I want definitely experiment more with it. The ability to change the fill of SVG on hover and animate with CSS just astounds me. Besides, I’m sick of icon fonts. Todd Parker’s talk from Artifact Conf on SVG really made me want to get off of icon fonts1. Making typographical improvements is a must and performance upgrades along the way.

Then I think next on the docket is a few more random things like getting it more friendly to tablet devices, adding Disqus, organizing categories for posts, making the stylesheets smaller and more conducive to OOCSS or a legitimate naming convention, a nicer 404. Generally I need to find more out about Jekyll as a whole, but all things in time.

I have a few more ideas but those ideas aren’t fully formed but definitely more to come.