Welcome Back, Codefluency
A couple weeks ago I moved hosts, and while doing so put up a parking page. Life interceded,
and I was down a bit longer than I would have liked, but codefluency is back up and running.
Some temporary shortcomings at the moment are, in order of importance:
1. –The atom feed (which seems to be the way a good percentage of people pick this up)– This should be working now; it’s up at its old location.
2. –The need to rewrite incoming links (tag articles/ on the front of those old links at the moment)– This should also be working. Let me know if you run into any bad links.
Notably, and possibly permanently missing are:
1. Search. Most browser-based readers come here directly for a specific article, and search has been essentially unused. Google does a better job of indexing the site in any case, so if it’s needed just tack site:codefluency.com onto the front of your query, and voila .
2. Comments. I love an active community just as much as the next guy (likely more, in fact), but I’ve always found the best type of communication of a more active (live, if possible) nature. I’ve had some great comments in the past, but the signal-to-noise ratio hasn’t been very compelling, even counting out spam. I’ve had a much better experience with those people who send a direct email, tweet, or IM (even if it’s just to say ‘hi’). If something’s said that’s worth an update to an article, it’ll happen. I’ve wrestled a bit with this, but that’s my conclusion; at least for the time being.
Now the obligatory comments on the current incarnation. Those of you that have known me for any length of time know how I feel about this website; it’s a playground, and it changes often. I had the previous design up for well over six months, which is likely a record for me. I’ll probably keep it that way.
So this time, a bit darker and content-focused. I’ve added a bit of vector art… which I’ve alternately heard called Rock Star and Maoist this time; an interesting stylistic overlap, I suppose. I’d heard comments that my old artwork looked dated, especially as it related to my hair (I’m growing it out for charity, so it’s obviously not short and spiky anymore), so this is a bit more accurate.
A quick note on the technologies used this go. I’ve opted for static pages, which is pretty refreshing for a guy who’s been up to his eyeballs in web frameworks, most notably Rails, for the past few years. I’m using Webby for generation; Tim Pease is both a good friend and a wickedly smart guy, and I really like what he’s put together. It’s built in Ruby, of course, and reminds me of the type of generation framework I wanted to write coming off of bloxsom years ago, but could never get quite right; Tim has done a much better job than I ever could. Webby comes with a rake autobuild task, which integrated with Jeremy Hinegardner’s heel and launchy projects makes on-the-fly generation a snap. Use Webby for static pages if you want something simple and straightforward.
Git and Nginx make up the rest of the toolkit; the website is actually a master repo that gets reset on update (thanks to ReinH’s suggestion and this script called in a post-update hook).
So, quick and simple is the callword for this version.
Okay, enough meta for now.
