Add new post about new website

_posts/2014-07-30-new-website.md

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+---
+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.