weissazool dot com

You probably didn’t notice, but I set up a website.

Yes, this, right here is a website. But it’s a template from Blogger. It would be more accurate to say that I built my own site. There’s a navigation bar on this page now, and all of the links (aside from ‘Blog’) will take you there.

What’s the difference? Why not set it up in Blogger?

All technical responsibility for my website devolves unto me.

• Is it not showing because of some problem with the hosting? My problem.
• Is it slow to load, or are there broken links? My problem.
• Are the colors poorly chosen? My problem.
• Is the design broken or buggy in another modern browser? My problem.

Well, except for…

Is there a monkey in your Gorditos?
Your problem.

• Is the design broken or buggy in Internet Explorer 6? Your problem.

Yes, there’s lots of fine and wonderful services that do the technical work for you. But I wanted to learn a little bit more about this world wide web thing people are talking about. And learning about and making it was a lot of fun.

It was also probably a much better use of my week than playing Diablo 3. I don’t know that I would have made that same decision in the past. Perhaps this is a sign of encroaching maturity.

For those interested in the technical keywords, I use a blogging framework called Jekyll. I style it with CSS, lay it out in HTML and Liquid, and write content in Markdown. Jekyll then takes care of the rest.

My ideal workflow is to be able to write and lay out a post, from start to finish, and then publish it, from the iPad.

Being able to make changes to the website layout and push those changes out to the host from the iPad is another goal.

A road map:

Migrate this blog off of Blogger.

Blogger is nice, but I would prefer to have all of my stuff in one place and with one design.

There’ll be some consequences.

• If I want comments (though so far they have been unnecessary) I will need to install something like Disqus as well.
• Followers (all two of them) and analytics will be lost.

The toughest consequence: Handling fish.

Since readership is low, those are negligible.

The tougher consequences:

• Handling images.
  
  Positioning and resizing and such are not part of Markdown’s spec. I wonder if there is a plugin or an extension for Markdown or Jekyll that handles it reasonably well. I can sacrifice a little precision if it means I don’t have to bang that out in HTML.
  
  (The answer: Yes. MultiMarkdown. Another thing to learn in the future.)


• Handling pagination with multiple posts on a page.
  
  This is really a design question that I need to think through first. The economy of space of just having a list of post titles and dates (my current plan) is nice. On the other hand, if for some reason someone is in the mood for a longer reading session, it may be nice to have multiple posts on a page.
  
  At the very least, I need a prev post and next post link.
  
  Also, related posts, particularly for project pages, are important.

Picture galleries.

This one’s a long way down the road. But I’d like to move my photos off of picasaweb at some point. I haven’t really given this much thought at all, though.

So there it is. weissazool dot com. This blog is still my primary bit of the internet, but one day they will merge to form the terrifying DEVASTATOR!