Evolution

One of the things I’ve tried to maintain with the branding around here is a building on top of what currently exists. Rather than completely toss out the visuals of designs and previous logos, I like to keep hints to the past. Part of that helps familiarity, but it also maintains a path of evolution rather than revolution.

Last week I rolled out an updated SimpleBits mark and simplified layout. I started tinkering a few months ago over on Dribbble and after some great feedback, settled on hex shape borrowed from the inner cube of the old mark, which was carried over from the original pixel art logo way back when. The new mark should work far better at smaller sizes and applications (which was the reason for the tweaking) and seemed fitting to bring back the original orange from the first (extremely dated) design from years ago (11px Verdana still looks good, no?).

Along with the new logo I made some adjustments to the template here as well. Most of those changes centered on a new typeface: FF Milo Web Pro which is versitle in various sizes, looks great in all caps and can be served up via Typekit (you need to purchase the font from FontFont first, which then unlocks it for use with Typekit).

Here’s to personal sites being a perpetual sandbox.

Ten Years

I’m about to head out on a little vacation, but I realized this Wednesday marks ten years of archives here at SimpleBits. Actually, there were a few other domains that came before simplebits.com (robotcom.com and cederholm.org). I’d actually been publishing short, frequent updates for a few years prior to 2000, either by updating a .html file by hand or using a hobbled together home-grown CMS built with PHP and Perl. Those old posts are long gone, but there’s about to be 10 years of archives still preserved here and that’s rather dumbfounding when I stop and think about it.

It’s likely dumbfounding because the last 10 years also happen to have been the most eventful I’ve ever had. They’ve been both terrifying and wonderful; educational and exciting; important and enlightening. I’m doubtful a majority of that shows up in the archives here. I was busy learning about the web, and that was mostly what was talked about in hypertext. Over the last decade, getting married, having kids, buying a house and other big life events mingled with starting a business or three, writing some books and traveling to parts of the world I never imagined visiting to talk about web design. I have an enormous amount to be thankful for.

Looking ahead, I wonder if I’ll look back at the next 10 years as being this dynamic. I hope so, but it’ll undoubtedly be different. Either way, I thank you very much for reading this tiny little corner of the web, and encouraging the (now) infrequent ramblings and bits.

Bye-Bye Redirect

A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. A ProxyPass redirect might’ve solved the problem for “masking” the index—but Tumblr doesn’t support that.

I came up with a rather low-tech and sloppy solution for getting rid of the redirect that I thought I’d share in case any of you are in a similar boat. It’s sloppy, but it works well. Many thanks @frogandcode for helping with the scripty-ness.

Here’s how it works: I’m now running a crontab every five minutes that curl’s stream.simplebits.com and saves the HTML source to a temporary file on simplebits.com. The script then copies the temporary file to simplebits.com/index.html (the copy was necessary as if the curl hangs for any reason, visitors won’t get a blank file). And that’s it. The HTML source from my index on Tumblr works like a charm so long as I ensure all the paths to images and other files are absolute.

The other benefit here is that the homepage is now a flat .html file. It’s pretty damn snappy. The downside is that there’s a possibility of a post not appearing for 5 minutes after it’s published (unless you’re viewing stream.simplebits.com). But I can live with that until I’m posting breaking news. 

On moving work

Decided to simplify things and just start another Tumblr to handle the portfolio here. This enabled me to reuse the new theme with some slight tweaks, and begin my “different shade background for each section” thing. It’s far from comprehensive yet, as I still need to bring over some more of the old stuff.

It’s been interesting going through work that’s several years old. Much of it doesn’t exist anymore. Gone. Vanished. All that hard work, thinking, stressing… poof. It’s a nice reminder of what’s important, and the reality of the ever-evolving web. A lot of this junk is just temporary. 

Welcome to the bitstream

Like many others before me, I’ve moved the weblog portion of SimpleBits over here to Tumblr. I did this for many reasons. I like that there’s one f!@#$ing template. That’s it. I don’t miss comments. I don’t mind that archives aren’t styled the same way as the main theme. I’m actually excited about the subtle social aspects of Tumblr.

I don’t have time to customize another CMS. I used to love having the time to customize a CMS only to find a better one and customize that. I’m aiming for efficiency now. I enjoyed designing this theme. I don’t like that simplebits.com is a redirect to stream.simplebits.com.

I have 10 years of archives. I had fun adding responsiveness to this design. I need to reskin the shop. I need to add static pages for speaking and about sections. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with the portfolio. If I waited till everything was perfect I would’ve never launched this thing. I’m now ok with doing things in stages. I think the most important thing in all of this is that I’ll be able to post quickly, easily, with less effort.

I’m looking forward to telling you more once I finish the book I’ve been writing for the past few months.