nicholasjon.com :: a weblog >> posts tagged: redesign

Updated Hamsters

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:40:45 GMT

The weather was less-than-conducive to anything other being a shut-in over the weekend, so I spent my time goofing around with the site (when I wasn’t playing Mass Effect). I believe this makes Version 7 for those of you keeping score at home.

No weather or time of day effects yet, but the code’s still in there so I’m expecting them to come back as more time avails itself (read: I beat Mass Effect).

Time Sensitive

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:54:29 GMT

I spent some time this afternoon building in time and weather sensitivity to my blog’s design. I spent absolutely zero time trying to phrase that last sentence so that I didn’t sound like a complete dork.

This redesign was partly driven by Smashing Magazine’s ‘30 dark designs’ article, partly driven by Amy spending all weekend blogging, and partly driven by the fact that ever since Dunstan Orchard took down his blog I’ve wanted to do something like this.

It’s a first step, there are only basic designs in place for sunny day, cloudy day and night. I think I’d definitely like to get a “twilight” one in there, maybe a rain or a snow, and then maybe a few easter eggs as I come up with them.

Comments and suggestions are, as always, welcome.

The basics

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:51:02 GMT

The world does not need another blogging engine, and yet I continue to write the stuff in my free time. I really don’t do it because have any notion of writing the “next great bit of blog software.” In a way, I do it for practice.

When I hear about some new-fangled technique for say rounding corners, or perhaps I discover a nifty little trick for ajaxifying permalinks, I like to have a safe place to test it out and play with it a bit. Rather than forcing those for whom I work to endure my sifting and winnowing process, I inflict it upon myself and let my own personal weblog suffer the consequences.

Since I started blogging in 1999, I’ve averaged writing about one new complete blogging engine per year. This post is the first post written in the new Motivated Hamsters. It builds upon the last verson of MH, but it’s also a bit of a throwback. At the core of it, the new MH is about letting me post how I want to, and where I want to. It integrates with Flickr and del.icio.us so I can tag and post my pictures and links once, and then bring them over here for display on my blog when I want to. Likewise, though no APIs were harmed during the process, copying and pasting a single URL will let me post a video from YouTube to my site. It makes posting easy, which (theory goes) will make it easier to post more often.

And if I don’t post more often, I assure you it’s because I just started writing another blog engine.

Note: There was supposed to be a neat little feature to MH that worked with Ferret to provide all sorts of “related posts” functionality. That’s still coming, but I’m having trouble getting it to work in production on Dreamhost. Soon…