Relaunching my blog

Posted 2013-07-09

Five years ago I turned this site into a blog. I used Apple's iWeb software, thinking this would make it easier to update the site than crafting HTML by hand. And it was, for a while. But iWeb has been dead for quite some time.

So I decided to relaunch the blog using a homegrown content management system (this makes it sound a lot bigger than it really is, trust me). With this, it's easier to fire off quick posts or just link to somewhere else with a comment. The title of these posts starts with a →.

To avoid scaring people away with large swaths of text, the homepage just shows a short intro by default. You have to click on the red triangle to expand the full text of a post in place. Because the text is already loaded, you'll see it immediately. You can of course also click on the title to see the post on a separate page.

If you decide you've seen enough, you can then click the triangle again to collapse the full text text of the post.

I wanted a clean, modern font for the blog, but not something as overused as Helvetica. Futura is pretty good, but too heavy. I looked at Century Gothic and ITC Avant Garde, but those are for-pay, and the buying options were too unwieldy for me—I was afraid to either buy the wrong thing or overpay. I considered Florencesans, which is very nice except that the t looks ridiculous. But then I found URW Gothic L. If you have any comments on the font or other aspects of the design of the site, I'm interested to hear them.

I've populated the new blog with the old posts as well as some photos I've posted from my iPhone a few years back and links to things I've written elsewhere.