Check Out My Sweet New Site

My site has been redesigned (or maybe I should say realigned, or maybe both). I’m excited about a lot of things in this new design:

• A liberal use of the (sIFR-enabled) typeface, Figgins,
• a hand-drawn logo mark (and by hand drawn I mean using the pen tool in the Gimp, although I did sketch it multiple times beforehand),
• more flexibility for different layouts,
• and other smaller things.

RSS Feeds

First off, an apology is owed for switching RSS feeds again.

When I changed domains I moved my RSS feeds to FeedBurner. Now I want them back. There’s no real flexibility with FeedBurner, and I want to create separate feeds for posts, asides, photos and all the combinations there between.

In my case FeedBurner is like using a dump truck to deliver content to users—put it all in their front yard and let them sort through it. I respect you more than that. So if you want to stay updated I highly recommend grabbing one (or more) of the feeds below in the footer.

The Home Page Flow

Function follows form, build the form around the functionality?

One of the main reasons for the redesign is to allow for a greater flexibility in post-length and content—actually just a greater flexibility site-wide—which came about from the process of function following form.

I’m currently still exploring the idea of form and function and how they are interconnected. My thoughts at the moment are functionality follows the form but the form is designed around the intended functionality. (Which I think is really close to the definition of minimalism.)

So it’s like a circle, but with a starting and ending point.

Work in Progress

Wait, why have you launched this already?

I suppose this goes without saying, but this redesign is still an ongoing process. There are several things I have to fix in IE 7 and the drop-cap on the post pages is formatted incorrectly in Safari. Also, the photos and archives pages aren’t live and the majority of the old content hasn’t been styled yet. (And finally right before I published this post the pages decided to break in Safari, awesome.)

But I think it’s complete enough to push it live. I’ll call this my “soft” launch. Hopefully, I’ll have the rest of it finished by this time next week.

Upcoming

I have a tutorial on how to utilize sIFR that is near completion, so that should be published soon; and I want to talk more in detail about the Figgins typeface and the new logo. Maybe even why I chose not to support IE 6 anymore, actually that one’s easy, less than 5% of my visitors are using it.

Feedback

Let me know what you think, comments, criticisms, etc.