Site redesign
I was never really happy with the previous design of this site. I was on a bit of a typography kick and wanted to stay as pure to typographical conventions as I could, but it ended up being a little boring and just plain not satisfying. The other day I had a vision of a red block with RidingTheClutch.com set at the bottom of it in white. That’s where this design started.
This design makes heavy use of HTML 5 and CSS 3. HTML 5 is pretty well supported across all major browsers with a little kickstart for IE. It’s really no different than HTML 4.01 with the exception a few new tags like <header>, <nav> and <article> which gives your page more meaning instead of just generic containers for layout. CSS 3 is used in the photo show in the upper right, along with giving the red header a subtle gradient (in Safari/Chrome) and subtle rollover effects on links (Safari/Chrome again).
The best way to experience the site is on a Mac in Safari since you’ll have Helvetica Neue and can see the sans-serif text on the page the way it was supposed to be seen. You’ll also have more complete coverage of CSS 3. The photos at the upper right are my latest uploads from Flickr (did you try clicking on them?). The Javascript code for this is open sourced on my Github page and is called stack.
This is only phase one of the redesign. I’m going to be adding navigation to a few sub pages as well as a footer with feeds from all of my various endpoints around the web: twitter, facebook, flickr, github, and content from some of my other sites.
I’ve been rethinking what it means to have a blog. It should really be a collection of all my “stuff,” not just random story-like posts whenever I get around to it. It should be the hub of everything “me” on the internet, no? When I commit a new piece of code to Github, or upload a photo of a new woodworking project to flickr, that information is all part of what’s going on with me at that moment. This site will be the place where all of this content is collected. I realize this can be a bit overwhelming so the standard RSS feed will still be blog posts, but there will be additional feeds for more thorough coverage. I will most likely be building my own piece of software to run this blog and migrate from jekyll.
Keep watching!