A new home page

I have a new home page design. (If you’re reading the RSS feed, check the home page.)

One reason is that the old home page’s design sucked. Almost everyone told me that it was drab in black and white. Personally, I think the new home page sucks in terms of colours as well. There’s too many. I suck at picking colours. The only good thing about these colours is that I left it to the judgement of experts. These are the colours in Powerpoint 2007‘s “Concourse” theme color, and I’ve just lifted them.

So, no, it wasn’t the colours that drove the redesign. My last redesign was over a year ago. I changed the structure from a list of links to two lists: one where I was just linking to interesting sites (bookmarking, really) and the other where I was writing content. The purpose behind that was to allow me to focus on writing stuff rather than just bookmarking.

And that worked pretty well for me.

In the last several months, I find myself writing more code than articles. I don’t quite have a way of sharing that. The new home page has a section dedicated to the sites I’m creating, and hopefully, it’ll let me share what I’m doing in a clearer way.

Another problem I have is that in attempting to write articles, I’ve cut myself off from writing the frivolous. Sometimes, I just need to share something small, like “I bought an Acer Aspire 5715Z” without going into the details of it. That’s not a bookmark. That’s not an article. I need a space in-between.

And that’s exactly the space micro-blogging captures.

I created a Twitter account last month. With the huge number of problems that twitter has, such as downtime and the lack of IM support, I hadn’t written a single tweet. Day-before, I created an account at identi.ca and it works just fine. Given that I now have 4 mobile devices, I should be able to do some decent microblogging.

This is actually my third or fourth attempt at redesigning my earlier home page. Every time, I’d start with a redesign, struggle with it, try to get things just right, and then eventually abandon the effort after a few weeks. This time, I succeeded — within a matter of three hours on my flight from Washington DC to London.

Two reasons. Yesterday, I found this CSS framework: 960.gs. It’s a grid system. And grids are absolutely the best way to get layouts for the web.

The other is an article from Coding Horror titled Quantity Always Trumps Quality. If you try to do stuff quickly, you end up doing better stuff than if you tried to do better stuff. To hell with perfection. Just get it out of the door.