A simple blog
Singularity: a modern grid framework
Everybody has a grid system these days. Frankly, I’m not surprised. There are so many different ways to deal with drawing elements across a grid and with CSS grid layout on the horizon the options for creating grids are only going to grow. People also like to use different class structures and naming schemes in their code, or want something different from a static 12 column grid. Handling breakpoints has made things even more complicated. Chris Coyer wrote a post Don’t over think grids that explains how easy it is to roll your own grid but as a project evolves your grid might evolve into something...
Specializing yourself into a corner
I'm a Sass addict. I will be the first to admit it and I can't imagine myself designing anything web related without Sass and Compass. These tools are awesome and make my life easy but they fragment the once blissfully uniform front end development landscape. Before, we had just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but now those languages are fragmented into Sass, Stylus, LESS, CoffeeScript as well as various code management tools like Compass and Bower.
Diversity is fantastic but in the end, we are all just trying to share HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is frustrating writing a Compass plugin to solve...
Design abstractions
In programming abstraction is a core development practice. The purpose is to separate commonly used components from specific use cases allowing the re-use of code. However, I see abstractions as more than this. Great abstractions are the distillation of an ideal and can be formed with just that ideal in mind, devoid of specific use case assumptions. Starting from a use case and abstracting from there is not unlike solving a maze backwards. The best ideas start from a blank slate with lots of research behind it. Starting with an abstraction allows you to research and explore with that abstract...
Vertically integrating website design and development
There are tons of tools to help with website design and development these days. A huge number of them are external tools that help you solve specific design problems and later fold them back into your website. Sites like Gridset, Typecast, Color Scheme Designer, gradient generators and many more have become popular among web designers. These tools are great as they help us find visual solutions in a purely visual format. Because they are so specialized, the code is clean and doesn't hurt the quality of our website code like putting together a whole site in the visual view of Dreamweaver might...
Unbuilding the blog
My website hasn't gone through any revisions since I left college about four years ago. Chris Coyer finally convinced me to start blogging again and not having a blog is not an excuse for not writing. I have high expectations for my new website and have a fairly concrete vision for it at this point. Every time I started with the CMS or blogging service which always left me frustrated and feeling I was miles down the wrong path in terms of what I wanted out of the design and functionality. So, I threw up this site which is just a collection of flat files displaied by Apache. The HTML is a straight...
A simple blog
Instead of over-engineering things, lets just get writing and keep things simple. What is more simple than a collection of files?
This works for now. This will hold me over until things are in place to make things better. The original flat-file CMS and we could all use some naked HTML every now and then to remind us of how things once were and how sometimes it's the simple things in life that work the best.