Hi people! As you can see, I have big news. I’ve changed a few things on kittygiraudel.com in order to make it look like a little bit more aesthetic and/or professional. What do you say?
Actually, this is the very recent redesign of daverupert.com (nice job by the way) who led me to do such a task. You see, for months (almost years!) and I don’t really know why, I thought I had to manage a CMS like WordPress or whatever to handle a blog. But why bother? Simple HTML/CSS pushing on a server and this is done, right?
A blog, what for?
This is a good question since I’m not planning on heavy blogging. You may know I’m a writer for Codrops and hell I’m proud of it. Anyway, it takes me a good amount of time, so I won’t be able to post things everyday here.
However, I really wanted a place on the internet to talk about some things I can’t write about at Codrops. I’m still talking about web, don’t worry. Things like tools, personal experiences, stuff about my work, my side projects, or whatever.
How does this work?
Actually this is very simple for now, but I’m planning on a few things to improve my workflow in a not so far future. As of today, I’m writing my stuff on Sublime Text in a template file, and then I push them to the server with a FTP client.
There is no JavaScript (nor jQuery), no plugin, no PHP and no database. Only a tiny little stylesheet. Which means the site is fast, and it matters a lot to me, especially when it comes to mobile browsing.
Anyway, I’d like to be able to manage things a little better. For example, I’d like to write my articles in Markdown instead of regular HTML. Also, depending on whether I post a lot of code snippets or not I may want to add Prism.js for the syntax highlighting.
I’m currently learning about Jekyll to be able to get rid of the FTP client and manage everything on an upper level, but it will take some time before I make the switch.
About the design
I know this may look a little flat but I wanted it to be. It’s minimalist to focus on the content and nothing else. No fancy buttons, no complex multi-columns layout, no heavy CSS transitions, etc. It’s a blog made with the content, for the content. This is why the font-size is huge, the line-height is important, there is a lot of space, and so on.
But I may improve the design over the time of course. :)
What’s next?
Honestly I don’t know. Blogging when I have time and things to say. Maybe a contact page or something.
For now, I’m not planning on adding a comments system because I don’t think there is much need for it. Most people won’t take the time to comment anyway, and those who would do can still catch me on Twitter. But if one day I feel like I should allow users to comment, I may think about Disqus. Mainly because I don’t want to spend hours doing PHP stuff on this.
Anyway, if you find any bug or have any suggestion, please catch me on Twitter.