Kickin’ it old-school

It’s been more than a year, since the last redesign of my site. I really had no intention of keeping it around that long. The previous version of eightface was mostly a reaction to the state of typography on the web and wanting to use a different typeface, I wasn’t particularly enamoured with it. I’ve attempted a few different redesigns since then, but they’ve all failed for various reasons. The latest version began life two months ago, but didn’t really get going until the middle of August. Since then, the design has come a long way but it still isn’t finished. So, feel free to poke around and kick the tires, but don’t be surprised if the axle falls off.

One of the driving factors behind the new design is the fact that I want to make my site a personal space again. I’m sick of templated personal sites and everything looking the same. I don’t want to become a crotchety old blogger man, but I’m headed in that direction. I don’t do this to make money, I do it for fun. I’ve had a website since 1995 (yea, Geocities!) and started writing HTML before that. Seriously, I memorized a bunch of tags from a brief magazine article, went home, coded a webpage (minus internet connection) and loaded it up in IE 2.0. I was a dork. I’m still a dork. The point is that I need to enjoy what I’m doing, I don’t want it to be a chore. Unfortunately, maintaining a popular WordPress plugin (as well as some others) is just that. I’m not knocking it, but the people visiting the site for plugins and themes have a different set of expectations. For that reason, the people who want WordPress related content will be getting a much more Spartan presentation with emphasis on finding what they need. The people visiting the rest of the site will get a much cooler presentation based on what I want to show them. It also lets me screw around without getting a bunch of angry emails.

The core weblog components are mostly finished, although the footer content is likely to receive a fair bit of tweaking. I’ve toyed around with a 1950’s motif before, but not to the same extent. I decided to focus solely on advertising from 1950–1955. Other than the grunge backgrounds, all of the graphics in the header and footer are composed of bits of advertisements from that time period. I’ve also attempted to replicate the typography of the era, the default typeface is Baskerville and the title font is Futura, both popular choices in advertising at the time. You’ll get the best viewing experience using a Mac with Futura installed, but it will likely look alright on Windows, although it hasn’t been tested. The Windows testing will come, but it’s not a priority (remember the personal site argument). Obviously, this iteration of the site is a better response to the state of typography on the web than the last layout. That said, it’s achieved by not caring that it doesn’t look right for anyone other than me, which isn’t always a viable option. To offset that potential lack of typographic coherency, there is a 840px wide grid underlying the disparate elements of the site.

Lastly, we come to comments. I’m getting rid of them. It’s not that I don’t care what you have to say, it’s that I want you to care about what I have to say (and dealing with comment spam sucks). In truth, comments on weblogs aren’t what they used to be. Back then, the community was a lot smaller and less likely to fall victim to Godwin’s law. Regardless of the lack of comments, it’s easy enough to offer a response via email, twitter, or your own weblog. And yes, I truly am turning into a crotchety old blogger man.

Eight years of eightface

I’ve been meaning to post this for a week or two now, but have been putting it off in favour of working on a redesign of the site. I registered the domain eightface.com eight years ago on August 16th, 2000, just before heading off to university. I wanted to move the site away from a subdirectory on my local ISP, get some real hosting, and a much cooler domain name. I had a lot of trouble coming up with a cool name and ended up just throwing two random words together. In typographical hindsight, eightface is a bitch of a word to work with, and I probably could have made my design work easier without a descender or the kerning issues when it’s in all-caps.

Eight years is a relatively long time — a drop in the hat for some, but it’s almost a third of my lifetime. As always, much has changed and much has remained the same. When I started the site, the “leader of the free world” was an impeached philanderer and not a cheerleader from Yale, you could bring water onto planes and Britney Spears was still somewhat innocent.

I have been with one webhost the entire time. I signed up for the basic Dreamhost plan, received 30mb of storage, very little bandwidth and almost nothing in terms of dynamic scripting. Now I have 733gb of storage, terabytes of bandwidth, and access to all sorts of dynamic programming. The price has remained the same and for the most part, the hosting has been been reliable.

This site has always been a weblog, although their scope of weblogs has shifted over the years. I started off using Blogger, when posts had no titles, no comments and were basically what we now seem to be calling tumblelogs. Having achieved a similar effect with a scribble.nu journal in a frame, I was drawn to the fact that I could publish to my own site from anywhere without needing an FTP client. From there, I moved to Moveable Type when Dreamhost let us have a database and perl access. I switched over to WordPress, because Six Apart began to charge for MT. I’ve considered moving on from WordPress (particularly for Habari, Django or EE), but the eight years of legacy leaves a lot to contend with. I could throw it all out the window, or move it to an archival subdomain, but the inept high-school and college-age ramblings are a part of me.

After a few months (or years) of pseudo-inactivity on the weblog, it needs a jump start. I started taking myself too seriously a few years ago, it hampered my ability to post and have fun with the site. Basically, I need to make this space personal again.