New site design Nov 25 2009

As the observant amongst you will have noticed, I’ve now updated this site with a brand new design. The really observant will have also noticed that it’s now hosted on Tumblr.

I really like the Tumblr platform, and I think it’s got some great tools for publishing content. The contributions and interest in the Feather blog app that me and Mike started 18 months ago seems to have dwindled this year, and maintaining that entire stack just to run my old site was getting to be more trouble than it was worth. I toyed with the idea of converting it to run on Rails 3.0, but don’t think I have the time to deal with a moving target (like we did against Merb when we started Feather).

I was also recently inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It! In there he speaks a lot about using the right tools for creating and promoting content effectively, and so I’m fairly confident now that by using Tumblr, I’ll spend more time writing interesting content for the site, rather than tweaking the code that runs it!

Creating the custom theme for this site on Tumblr was fairly simple - the theme engine is very powerful, and does a lot of things right. It has a few shortcomings, namely not being able to tell when you are on a private post versus a public one, however I’ve enjoyed the process of building out the site to run on Tumblr, and am more than happy with the results.

So any comments on the new design are welcome, and if anyone is interested in some of the more technical aspects of Tumblr themes, please let me know, I may be able to help! Some more interesting posts coming soon.