Vinyl Will Never Die
Via Reddit, music sales (by type) over the last 30 years. Spoiler alert: vinyl never dies!
2013
A peek under the hood of the website revamp
_Image by riversidetransport under a CC-BY-NC-SA license
I am not a web developer. My HTML is rudimentary at best and you should be very afraid when I start poking at CSS and Javascript. Though things might be a bit prettier than they were, I’m going to take this opportunity to highlight the tools I used to give my website a makeover.
Homepage
For 5 years, I left up a “Coming Soon” webpage with some links to Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I am the definition of lazy!
For anyone looking to quickly get a webpage up, be it for a homepage or a project page for a personal project, I highly recommend Bootstrap. Originally created by Twitter to help them standardize, Twitter later made Bootstrap open source and it’s been widely adopted and extended. Bootstrap features the latest in web development – it’s grid based, responsive and uses a combination of HTML, CSS and Javascript to help you quickly build web pages.
Being even lazier, I used Jetstrap, a web based interface to build Bootstrap pages. Log in using your favorite service, pick from a couple of default page templates, customize them and Jestrap will take it from there. Pressing download, Jetstrap will give you the HTML, CSS and Javascript in one zip file. Quickly edit the text in the HTML files and you’re ready for deployment.
Bootswatch has created a number of themes for Bootstrap. The homepage is using the Spacelab theme. Pick a theme, save the CSS file, replace the Bootstrap CSS with the new CSS file, and done! Couldn’t be easier.
The social media icons are by Fairhead Creative. They use a combination of SVG icons and CSS to display and are available on Github.
Blog
WordPress has been powering this blog for almost 10 years. I started with the original b2/cafelog ten years ago, migrating to WordPress months later when WordPress was first released.
The blog theme is a WordPress Twitter Bootstrap theme by 320press. It features sub-themes built on the Bootswatch themes for Bootstrap and I’m using the Spacelabs theme, similar to the homepage. The theme doesn’t feature a header image that I’ve been able to find, so I’ve turned off the hero feature, which allows you to get to the blog content faster. The theme, like the homepage, is responsive, so if you’re viewing on a tablet or a mobile phone, the page will scale to the device you’re viewing it on.
WordPress plugins that are being used:
Tools
Github is the magic that ties it all together. I try and do everything in Git using source control, making it easier to do development from any computer I might be using. I’ve been using Git for a few years, but I barely scratch the surface with what Git can do. You can find my repositories on Github.
I’ve been a very happy Linode customer for a few years. If you’re in the market for a new webhost, Linode’s Linux virtual private servers are the way to go.
Last, and definitely not least, all of the code was written and edited in Panic’s Coda 2 web editor. A brilliant text / code editor, with a built-in FTP client, terminal, version control support and more, it makes it all too easy.
Happy New Year and welcome back
Welcome to the revamped paulcutler.org.
I’m your host, Paul. With January upon us, the blog has officially turned 10(!). One of my New Years resolutions is to blog more – I only blogged twice last year, but I can’t tell you the number of ideas I had for blog posts that I saved in Evernote, Google Reader or Pocket / Instapaper. This year I hope to follow through on that a bit more.
With the blog’s ten year anniversary here, I went back and looked through some of the old blog posts – and quickly wished I hadn’t. Maybe that’s not fair, but I believe my writing style has improved since I first created the blog. The blog has gone through a number of iterations – first as a place to share whatever I wanted, including technology, digital rights, sports, or gaming. Later, as I became more involved with open source projects, the blog became a place to share news or thoughts about the projects I was involved with. As I became less involved, and with the rise of Twitter, the blog posts tapered off.
I plan to go back to the original premise and share my thoughts and interests on technology, digital rights, tabletop games and anything else that might come to mind. I’ll share interesting links from around the web – some you may already have seen and others may be new to you.
Lastly, I’ll be talking about music. I’ve always been an avid music fan, but a few years ago I bought my first turntable and got into vinyl in a big way. I started a music blog, which also has suffered from a lack of posts in the last year. I’ll be combining the blogs and only using the blog at paulcutler.org going forward, so this is also where I’ll be talking about music.
In preparation for 2013, I’ve spent some time re-designing the home page and the blog. But we’ll save that for another post. You have to have a reason to want to come back, right?