Posted by TJ on 3/2/2014Tags: Blog News, Design, ExpressionEngine, LifeI Burned Down the Old Site, Here’s The New One
No joke, this is an entirely new site, new installation of ExpressionEngine, new design, new everything. I did import all the old entries of course, dating all the way back to just a couple months before I married my beautiful wife. It feels so good to have a clean system, untainted from all my messing around and not knowing what I was doing with ExpressionEngine over the years.
Merge
The first thing to note is that I have merged by personal blog that has always resided on this website, with my tech blog from BuzzingPixel.com. The reason for this is having a movie blog, a tech blog, and a personal blog felt a bit disjointed. I wanted to consolidate and try to refresh my personal “brand” so to speak. So, all non-movie related items that I want to write about go here. That means you’re going to get all kinds of stuff on this blog and if you look back through the entries, you’ll find all the old entries from BuzzingPixel as well as the old entries from my personal blog. No more distinction.
Design
I think it’s important for me, as a professional web developer to have a slick, good looking website. When I rolled out design iteration four (the previous design) of this site a few years ago, I received a fair number of compliments. But since that time, mobile devices have become ubiquitous, retina screens have become more prolific — I got a retina MacBook Pro and boy did that old, non-retina design look hideous — and the design in general had become quite dated. I wanted a new design that was super clean, lent itself more to reading, was retina and mobile friendly, and in general would make me proud of my own website. In addition, there was not much of a focus on the site for telling the world about me or my family. For the redesign, I wanted to address all those issues.
So, for starters, go ahead and grab the edge of your browser (if you’re reading this on a Mac or PC), and squeeze that window down small. You’ll see that the site responds to the browser size (made possible by Wee!). If you’re already reading this on a mobile device, then you’ll see that the site looks great on your device. And I paired down the design to a few essential elements. It’s clean, it’s sharp (to me at least), and I like it.
Frequency
I really doubt this means that I’ll post much more often — most of my free time is consumed by MovieByte. But I’m going to try to write something here at least once every couple of weeks (go ahead and mark down my failure prediction).
Well, that’s pretty much it. It’s new, it’s shiny, and I like it. I worked hard on it with late nights and weekends and if you think it looks cool, feel free to let me know. If you don’t like it, well, remember how hard I worked on it and keep your opinions to yourself! (Kidding… kind of).