Realign

I’ve just published a new design on this blog. First version was a good start but I think that the new design brings it much closer to what I originally was looking for.

Idea for the big footer is stolen from Jeff Croft, whose site is a great demonstration of what can be accomplished with Django and some imagination. Front page is now a bit different than other pages, and comments had some loving too. The main focus has been on simplicity. And, like always, it’s far from finished.

(A note to IE users: I’m almost certain that something here breaks with your crappy browser. Frankly, I don’t care. After fighting those stupid IE bugs and other historical CSS quirks all day long for client sites, it’s very refreshing to ignore them on a personal site. So no love for your broken browser from here. Not now, not ever. Upgrade to a real browser, get a Mac, or die whining. Thank You. PS. If something breaks with Opera, OmniWeb or some other cool browser, please let me know!)

After the first release at November, there have been quite many upgrades under the hood along the way. Tags can now be viewed in a cloud and individual tag pages have related links (links with same tags) attached. There is an RSS-feed for each tag also. To be 2.0-credible, I integrated my Last.fm data to a local database and pull it to the footer and (at the moment very unstyled) a dedicated music page.

The best is yet to come

This blog has become my personal sandbox for Django development. I’ve experimented with some AJAXy stuff with my own comments app and a basic inline editing proof of concept (a quicktime demo), both of which I hopefully get soon in shape for giving back to community as open source. I’m planning to write up more Django tips in the future to point out some cool but undocumented features that I’ve been playing with lately.

Trying to share data between Finnish and English parts of the site has proven to be a bit tricky. For example the links in the footer may (or may not) look odd if you can’t read Finnish. These kind of things are becoming more important in a world where people from different backgrounds meet on the Web, so I’m sure there will be some i18n topics in this blog in the future.

As always, comments and suggestions are very welcome!