Welcome to the new site! After several months and several [very distinct] iterations of the layout, I am happy to publish this clean new look for 2013. No PHP, no AJAX, just a simple, responsive, readable design.

The original site was published back in 2009, and was powered by WordPress. WP is nice, but it is exhausting to maintain, as well as keep up to XHTML spec. For this new site I decided to use a static site generator. Compared to a PHP site which renders pages dynamically from a database of posts, static sites are regenerated in full each time a post is added or updated. For this site I am using Jekyll, which reads posts in Markdown (actually, I’m using kramdown) and renders them to HTML. This is the same tech which powers GitHub Pages.

Every page before this has been exported from WordPress and integrated into the new workflow. Every effort has been made to preserve the look and feel of the original posts, however there is only so much one can do (and indeed should do) about these migrations. I encourage all visitors to use the feedback button at the bottom of every page to report errors and inconsistencies.

The version of the site released a few months ago (let’s call it 2.0), while a worthwhile experiment in CSS 3D transforms, proved too difficult to maintain across all browsers and all devices. CSS 3D is just not ready for the prime time yet, in my opinion. Someday I will return to that ambitious goal of designing a truly three-dimensional website, but for now I am happy to provide a functional website, which looks good irrespective of the device from which it is viewed.

RIP, cube.

So version 1.x was ancient, and version 2.0 was a bit too futuristic. Welcome to 2.1, a responsive website which is, if anything, a sign of the times: it is built with Skeleton, an interesting fellow from 2011 which provides a variation of the 960 grid for designing webpages. The stylesheets are written in LESS and then rendered to CSS when the site is generated.

I hope you enjoy it!

—Ben