Yep, my blog now has a new design! It has been over a year since the last one, and I really wanted to try out a design I’ve had on my sketchpad for ages. I can’t remember where I saw this style of blog (dark, light, dark, stuff at bottom etc), but if it does come to me, or I see it again, I’ll put a nod in the right direction, or change it completely if I find it is too similar (This is why using a random sketch isn’t so great, you forget sources, and it looks like plagarism).

Design

  • My navigation is now at the top, but has now been joined by the search box.
  • On the bottom I now keep a short bit about me (which will soon link to the about page), some other links to RSS feeds and the like, and a sampler of gallery pictures (also to be implemented)
    *Tag clouds now appear at the bottom of most pages when there is no comments or older posts to display.

Site Layout

  • The front page of the site now displays the latest blog post, as well as some of the more recent ones.
  • The Weblog page is now where the archives reside, and all my old posts can be found there.
  • On each post’s dedicated page, there is short summary of the post up top, just so people coming straight into the site know where they are.
  • There is a dedicated Tag Cloud page, making it easy to see what subjects I blog most often (bike is currently miles in the lead).
  • These is now a comment feed for the whole site, individual comment feeds for each post, and feeds for each of the tags. I’ll link to the last of those soon so you can try them out.

Architecture

  • Ruby on Rails! Yep, my new site is the result of about two weeks of work with RoR. No more PHP for this blog!
  • Now with tagging. One of my main reasons for changing languages was that I could add new features such as tagging without having to work with old stale code, plus it let me learn something new.

Operating System

Installing mod_fastcgi on Fedora Core 5 was a bit of a nightmare, so I decided to change linux distributions. As I write this I’m currently running Ubuntu Breezy under Parallels desktop on my Macbook. Dapper doesn’t run under parallels for some strange reason, and the Edgy beta is also having problems, so I’ll stick with Breezy for these initial tests. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll also be trying out Solaris 10 and FreeBSD.

Currently the site is served using… Lighttpd under Ubuntu Dapper.

Still to Come

As with all my new releases, it’s a little rough around the edges. The backend is still pretty much a Rails scaffold affair, and I still have features to add such as…

  • Gallery, might simply be Flickr, Zoomr, or Smugmug integration, I’m undecided as yet.
  • About, Bike, Contact, Design, and Links pages.

Side Effects

Obviously all these changes mean that some URLs have changed.

  • All the old blog post addresses will still work, but redirect to their new equivalents.
  • The RSS feed for blog posts has also now moved to feed://douglasfshearer.dyndns.org/feeds/blog, so make sure you update your RSS readers.

See anything wrong?

If you see anything wrong, please don’t hesitate to get in touch: dougal.s@gmail.com