Website Redesign

I’ve been working hard on redesigning this site. You can see what it used to look like, above. It’s been a fun ride: I took this opportunity to learn more about HTML5 and CSS3. I’m pleased with what I’ve made. The result of my work is the custom WordPress theme you see now. I learned a lot in redesigning this site (mostly HTML and CSS, but a little PHP too). Over time, I’ll be rolling out some summaries of what I learned in blog posts.

Geek section: As it’s just a personal site, I’ve been experimenting with new HTML5 features and semantic tags, keeping the markup as minimal as possible, and applying visual effects only through CSS. As a result, there are very few images (all the gradients, shadows, rounded corners, and animation are pure CSS3) and the design degrades elegantly for older browsers. It even looks decent in the 9-year-old IE6. I’m preferring the new video and audio tags instead of Flash or other plugins as much as possible. The site even works (and looks) great on my iPhone. HTML5 and CSS3 still have problems, but the future of the web looks bright.

I also took the time to pull together some old content from other sites. There are still some gaps, but there are posts going all the way back to 2002. (I cringe a little reading some of it, but it’s interesting to see how much I have—and haven’t—changed.) Some posts have only been living on a hard drive for the last 8 years, but others have been on other services like Blogger. I’ve done my best to redirect links here.

Please let me know what you think in the comments.