Complete Site Overhaul
The time has come to leave SDF, this site’s home for over three years now. I have been contemplating a move for quite some time and recently the remaining pieces have fallen into place. I finally decided on a domain name, a new design, a content management system, and a proper division between work and play.
This move represents much more than just a change of name—it is a complete
overhaul in terms of design, organization, and everything under the hood.
The site’s new home will be jblevins.org. I have been working on the new
site for several weeks now and I believe it is finally stable and ready to
deploy. I will be gradually redirecting various parts of the site over the
next few days. If all goes well, every URI on the old site will be
permanently redirected to its new location.
In terms of presentation, I hope the new site will be cleaner and more readable. Also, with the exception of raster images, everything is set to a scalable em-based layout.
As for organization, I am moving towards a hybrid static-weblog approach—basically a content management system with some entries that act like dated entries and others that are more like static pages. However, everything will live in the same categorical directory hierarchy. There will no longer be an organizational distinction between static and dynamic content.
Most of the changes are under the hood. The new site is built completely on Blosxom and all content is stored in Markdown format. Previously, the site was separated into a static part, rendered using Genpage, and a dynamic weblog rendered by Blosxom and I had to write everything in XHTML. I have also added support for on-the-fly conversion of LaTeX-style equations to MathML for displaying mathematics, revamped easier-to-navigate photo galleries (still without any fancy javascripts), etc. Despite the fact that everything is dynamic, the new site should be much faster than the old one thanks to the swift servers over at A2 Hosting.
Finally, I will do my best to minimize problems with the feeds. Presently, the site at SDF emits two feeds: Atom 1.0, RSS 2.0. I have decided to focus mainly on providing a valid full-text Atom 1.0 feed and continue the RSS 2.0 feed with headlines only. Both will be redirected to their new counterparts as one of the final steps in the move. I apologize in advance for any odd behavior such duplicate items, etc.