Growing up

In January, Tim Lucas pulled together a shiny new site and boosted his article quality dramatically. I thought “he’s doing it right”, I really wanted to get my site together. That was January—here I sit the day before August staring into textmate typing the first article I’ve written in almost 2 years, I haven’t even bothered to move those old posts. It wasn’t worth it.

During this year I’ve made more open source releases and contributions than ever before, I’ve lapped up various technologies and concepts, wrote my first DSL with ruby and felt like I was pushing through to another level, mentally anyway.

Its not hard to say that leaving my salary paying job and moving to consulting was one of the best things I’ve done. It felt selfish to leave the team for a reason none other than “I needed time away”. That was a year ago. Since then I’ve had more time to reflect on life and importantly, development.

Juicy details

You might notice that the new site has a bunch of links to various web services. I’m pulling my “about the author” image from twitter, “upcoming events” from upcoming, “projects” from github, “presentations” from slideshare, “links” from delicious and recent images from flickr – all using Smoke, not only that, but I do so using only about 45 lines of source code.

I was inspired by Yahoo’s “Pipes” but frustrated with the strange act of dragging elements around the screen. While knowing what I wanted to do, I found that I could probably write a custom parser faster. A vast majority of the research or ‘learning’ projects that I’ve put together consume web services. Now, with Smoke I can pull services together, mash them up, cut them to pieces and re-interpret the web the way I feel it should be.

The article facet of this site is pinched straight from Tim Lucas' site, I dropped it in, it worked, I drank beer.

I typed a series of commands (maybe, 5?) and my site was running on Heroku. Job done. I’ll probably leave the beer alone tonight though. What an awesome experience that was, I’m a fan of doing it yourself, but this quick win felt so good.

For now, I’m going to run without comments, if you’ve got something to stay ensure that you drop me a line, I’d love to hear about it.

The markup used on the site is HTML5, thanks to Lachlan Hardy it even displays pretty well in IE6. No hacks are used, perhaps a few CSS methods that don’t appear in older browsers, however the fallback is indeed graceful.

I’m responsible for the design of the site. Anthony gave me moral support, slapped some layout tips and rules on me when I asked for them. I think he found it really hard to watch me go through the process of putting the site together. Generally, when we work together he is the design part of our voltron machine. In future I’ll leave our client design work up to him.

In closing

A web site is never “done”, I hope to evolve this site and keep it as fresh as I can for as long as I can (using technology, of course). Perhaps I’ll end up writing better… God, I failed english in high school because I preferred to skip it to eat chinese and play pool with my friends. If it doesn’t kill me it’ll only make me stronger, right?