Google Summer of Code
The title says it all. After having my old homepage around for nearly two years, with nearly no activity and not having written a blog post since what feels like forever I decided it was time for a redesign of my homepage and moving the blog from blog.tgummerer.com to the main site. This site will show some blog posts, although I’m not sure how regular they will appear and most of my projects, to some of which I might write a blog post too.
Technology
I wanted to go a bit away from PHP for this project, since I already did quite some projects with PHP and use something different. I looked a bit at Django and Ruby on Rails but for a personal homepage with some blog posts they seem a bit overblown. That’s when I stumbled across a blog post by Steve Losh writing about why and how he moved his personal site from Django to Hyde and decided to give it a try.
So far I’m pretty happy with the choice, updating the site is no problem at all and designing it isn’t a problem either after some initial bumps, which will always be ther when you learn something new.
Responsive design
Since the guys at Smashing Mag seem to be constantly suggesting it, and I’ve seen it pop up at various different places I decided to try to make my new webdesign responsive. Since I’m a programmer and I’m lazy, I used the Columnal CSS Framework for it. So far it worked out nicely, just try to resize your browser window to see a demo of it. Oh it won’t work in older versions of the Internet Explorer, but I don’t really care about it. If you’re still using it you should upgrade to a decent browser anyway.
Open source
With this new design I also decided to go open source. Everyone can view the code, fork it on GitHub and do whatever they want with it. I won’t be happy if you sell it to someone (even if I don’t think that would be even possible), but if you want to you could also sell it. The code is on GitHub.