52 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
52 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: New Website
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layout: post
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---
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[My old website](https://github.com/thallada/personalsite) was a nice
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demonstration of my knowledge of Django, but I decided recently that my web
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development knowledge had exceeded what it was showing off. The main thing that
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annoyed me about my last website was that I was hosting what essentially was a
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static website on a web framework meant for dynamic websites. It was time for a
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update.
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I decided to go with [Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/) which had everything I
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wanted:
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1. Write posts in markdown and have them auto-magically show up on the website
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as HTML.
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2. Really easy to host on [Github](http://github.com), I just push new posts to
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my [repo](https://github.com/thallada/thallada.github.io) and I'm done.
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3. It's a static website, so it loads waaay faster than my old Django blog that
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has to generate each page from a template on every request.
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4. It's developer friendly. There are a ton of plugins and it's really easy to
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write my own if I ever need to.
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I traditionally have used [Twitter Bootstrap](http://getbootstrap.com/) for
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styling pretty much every site I've made, but in the spirit of minimalism I
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wanted to roll my own so I wouldn't have to import all the extraneous stuff
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Bootstrap provides that I don't need. The only thing I really wanted was a grid
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system, and [it's actually not that set-up on your
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own](http://www.adamkaplan.me/grid/). You can read about the details of my full
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implementation in [the README for this website's github
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repo](https://github.com/thallada/thallada.github.io/blob/master/README.md).
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The hardest part of this project though, was the
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[magic](https://github.com/thallada/thallada.github.io/blob/master/js/magic.js)
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on the front page. I found [a wonderful article by
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Maissan](http://www.maissan.net/articles/simulating-vines) about how to simulate
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vines growing in Javascript and adapted it to display multi-colored tendrils
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that grew randomly on the background of my homepage. I was inspired by the Fred
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Brooks quote, now displayed on my front page, to code something that would
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express the sort of "exertion of imagination" that makes programming such a joy.
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I'm quite happy with the result. It's probably the most complicated canvas
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drawing application I've made to date. Initially, it was really CPU intensive,
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but I managed to optimize the code and fine-tune it so that it ran consistently
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under 20% (on my machine), which was actually better than a few chrome
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extensions I was running anyways.
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Hopefully this new blog will also inspire me to write more posts as [my last
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post](http://thallada.github.io/2013/10/03/publishing-draft-docs-to-my-blog.html)
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was almost a year ago now.
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