Relaunch!

After weeks of research, hard work, pulling my hair out, and drinking too much wine, I've finally convinced myself that the blog is ready for relaunch.

Redesign

Disclaimer: I am not a designer.

As with every redesign, I'm stuck with my limited visual imagination, so it's a typical "header > content > sidebar > footer" site. I made an effort to use as few nodes as possible to not muddle up the DOM, and used SASS to create my (still-bloated) CSS. I used curlJS and AMD to create all of the JavaScript modules and functionality. I took a good amount of time ensuring the site looks good at different screen sizes and on different devices. Other than that, there's not much to say.

New Features

With each redesign, I tell myself "you're going to do this, this, and this." By the end of it, I say "OK, this is ready, and those other two will come later." Not this time. Here's a roundup of what's new:

• AJAX Page Loads + pushState: I 've wanted to do AJAX page loads for a while and now was the right time. Christoph Pojer's History class made AJAX page loads not only fun but fairly simple. Pages are also "cached" in a JS object, and since the sidebar doesn't need to be loaded more than once, page loads should be very fast.
• Next/Previous Post Links: If your monitor is of decent size, you can see "next" and "previous" post links to the left and right sides of the page, allowing for much easier post navigation.
• Keyboard Navigation: I'm super excited about this. If you're on a list page like CSS Tutorials, you can press up and down keys to move from one post in the list to another. If you're on a post page (like this one), you can press the left or right key once to see what the previous or next post is, then again to view that post.
• Top / Dropdown Navigation: I acknowledge my site has been difficult to navigate simply because I haven't provided enough options; I've fixed this by highlighting popular pages in those menus.
• Speed: I've written the site with speed in mind, so I created a build process for this theme. The build process:
  • Minifies all JavaScript using UglifyJS
  • Minifies all CSS
  • PNGCrush'es all images
• New & More Specific Categories: I've added the following post categories:
• Canvas & SVG
• Quick Tips - Very short posts that will allow me to post more often
• CSS Animations
• Comment Code Editing: Writing code in a textarea sucks -- even copy/pasting to a textarea is a nightmare. Now you can click the "Use Code Editor" link to transform the comments textarea into a workable text editor.
• Mobile: The site should still look sexy on mobile. Additionally, swiping left and right on post pages should take you to the previous and next articles.

I have a few more ideas for features and those should come relatively shortly. Hopefully these are enough to hold you over though!

Script & Style is BACK!

I never wanted to close Script & Style in the first place but it was not maintained well and it was starting to look bad. I've rebuilt Script & Style from the ground up and integrated it with this site. The Script & Style Twitter account has been posting for weeks already and there's a new Script & Style Facebook page. Feel free to follow any and all. Also, please be sure to submit awesome blog posts so they get the attention they deserve and so they may inspire thousands of other developers!

My Gift To You

Over the next month, I'll be publishing guest posts from legends in the JavaScript, CSS, vector graphic, PHP, and python communities. You'll see names like Chris Coyier, John Hann, Thomas Fuchs, Guillermo Rauch, and many more. They're incredible developers and I look forward to sharing all of them with you.

I've also made an effort to round up giveaways or coupon codes from vendors I use for this website -- look forward to those too!

Lastly, it isn't so much a gift, but I'm renewing my commitment to bringing you some awesome tutorials that have been missing from my blog over the past few years. It's time to step it up!

See a Bug?

I've created a blog GitHub repo to allow users file issues they find around the site. If you see something wrong, or have a feature request, please file an issue on GitHub and I'll get to it as soon as I can. Thank you!

Thank You!

Thank you all very much for your support over the past 5 years. I'll keep writing as long as you all keep reading. THANK YOU!