From b10168d6df9f386fa4bf5177b95d30eadbc00a51 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Tyler Hallada Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 18:21:11 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Add new post about new website --- _posts/2014-07-30-new-website.md | 51 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 51 insertions(+) create mode 100644 _posts/2014-07-30-new-website.md diff --git a/_posts/2014-07-30-new-website.md b/_posts/2014-07-30-new-website.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5c9e969 --- /dev/null +++ b/_posts/2014-07-30-new-website.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: New Website +layout: post +--- + +[My old website](https://github.com/thallada/personalsite) was a nice +demonstration of my knowledge of Django, but I decided recently that my web +development knowledge had exceeded what it was showing off. The main thing that +annoyed me about my last website was that I was hosting what essentially was a +static website on a web framework meant for dynamic websites. It was time for a +update. + +I decided to go with [Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/) which had everything I +wanted: + +1. Write posts in markdown and have them auto-magically show up on the website +as HTML. +2. Really easy to host on [Github](http://github.com), I just push new posts to +my [repo](https://github.com/thallada/thallada.github.io) and I'm done. +3. It's a static website, so it loads waaay faster than my old Django blog that +has to generate each page from a template on every request. +4. It's developer friendly. There are a ton of plugins and it's really easy to +write my own if I ever need to. + +I traditionally have used [Twitter Bootstrap](http://getbootstrap.com/) for +styling pretty much every site I've made, but in the spirit of minimalism I +wanted to roll my own so I wouldn't have to import all the extraneous stuff +Bootstrap provides that I don't need. The only thing I really wanted was a grid +system, and [it's actually not that set-up on your +own](http://www.adamkaplan.me/grid/). You can read about the details of my full +implementation in [the README for this website's github +repo](https://github.com/thallada/thallada.github.io/blob/master/README.md). + +The hardest part of this project though, was the +[magic](https://github.com/thallada/thallada.github.io/blob/master/js/magic.js) +on the front page. I found [a wonderful article by +Maissan](http://www.maissan.net/articles/simulating-vines) about how to simulate +vines growing in Javascript and adapted it to display multi-colored tendrils +that grew randomly on the background of my homepage. I was inspired by the Fred +Brooks quote, now displayed on my front page, to code something that would +express the sort of "exertion of imagination" that makes programming such a joy. + +I'm quite happy with the result. It's probably the most complicated canvas +drawing application I've made to date. Initially, it was really CPU intensive, +but I managed to optimize the code and fine-tune it so that it ran consistently +under 20% (on my machine), which was actually better than a few chrome +extensions I was running anyways. + +Hopefully this new blog will also inspire me to write more posts as [my last +post](http://thallada.github.io/2013/10/03/publishing-draft-docs-to-my-blog.html) +was almost a year ago now.