Subscribe to CommentsI’m really proud to announce this new site design. It’s pretty huge. To me, anyway. This is the first one I’ve done completely from the ground up, not mashing together other themes or designs. That means that it’s pretty simple, but that’s okay. My main goal was simplicity and cleanness, with a header I can easily swap out as the whim strikes.
The most major thing is that the blog is now part of a larger site, instead of the blog BEING the site. So the blog is still at www.the-frame.com/blog, and you won’t have to update your links or RSS subscriptions or anything, but now if you go to www.the-frame.com you actually get a working site that matches the blog instead of a parked URL, which is basically what it was before. (Someday I may actually change the URL to jandysmeanderings or something, but I don’t feel like messing with domain names and everything right now.)
So, a tour.
- The home page has an excerpt from the blog, an excerpt from my tumblr (more on that in a sec), the featured video, a quote which I expect to change every now and again, my last few flickr photos, my Friendfeed feed, a music player with some current favorite songs, and my current reads/watches/games. It basically does what my old sidebar did, but less…vertically spread out.
- The blog is what it always has been, just with less gunk in the sidebar, because that gunk is on the front page. :)
- Tumblr is a great media-blogging/sharing platform that I’ve used sporadically for quite a while. I’ve always wanted to use it more because its media integration is great, and it’s perfect for sharing those little random things I’m always finding on the internet but don’t want to write a bunch about. But after various unsatisfying attempts at integrating it into blog sidebars, etc, I decided to just put it on my site – separate from my blog, but still integrated with the larger site. Generally, I’ll post stuff on Tumblr that I want to mention briefly or share but don’t want to write a whole blog post about.
- To subscribe to the blog, click here. To subscribe to the tumblr, click here. To subscribe to a combined feed of both, click here.
- The portfolio page will list the work I’ve done. So far it’s just a couple of personal blog designs and basic coding projects I did recently at work, but hopefully that will increase as time goes on.
- The about page talks about me. Me me me! Seriously, it’s pretty boring, but I hear people like sites with human beings behind them, so that’s my “I’m a human being” page.
- The contact page has a few ways to contact me through social networking sites, as well as a super-shiny ajax contact form! I’m so excited I got an ajax contact form to work that everyone should go contact me through it right now. I’m kidding. Don’t everybody do that. I mean, if you want to. But yeah, I didn’t write it because I don’t even know javascript, much less ajax, but I did style it some and GOT IT TO WORK. I felt accomplished, anyway.
- The Reviews & Articles and Wiki links lead to two of my other sites, one where I keep the academic articles I’ve written as well as archive the reviews I’ve written, the other a wiki I dabble with focused on (what else?) movies and books.
- The first banner for the site is, of course, the lovely Anna Karina – actress, muse, and some-time wife of Jean-Luc Godard. As my friend put it when she saw who I’d picked for the banner, “duh, you even name your gaming avatars after her.” And she’s not making that up.
So for anyone who might have noticed the sporadic questions on FriendFeed or other forums wondering how to do programming things or complaining about CSS not behaving right, this is what it was for, and I got almost everything to do what I wanted, aside from having to use a widget for the Tumblr excerpt on the front page because I’m not smart enough to tap into their API. Yet. :)
And if you notice something not working or behaving funky, please let me know. I did code this from ground up and I’m sure I did some stupid things, since I haven’t done that before. I did notice that the front page crashes Opera (the other pages seem to work), so if anyone has any idea why that is, please tell me! I don’t get much Opera traffic, but it’d be nice if it worked.
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