New Theme!!!

You may have noticed something new when you browsed here today. No, I didn’t adopt another kid… I didn’t have to shovel 12 inches of snow… It’s a new theme for the website! I’m sure you are as excited as I am about the change… Doesn’t matter - this is my blog, and I can put whatever I want here.

This theme is awhile in the making. I’ve been doing web development for probably 17 years (well, I’ve been pretending to do it for that long - much of that time has been dedicated to managing web developers, but let’s not split hairs), and in the time I’ve been doing it, it has changed mightily. In the early years, you had to do literally everything yourself. And in an environment that didn’t match up with many of the desktop or server environments (that being HTML/JavaScript/CSS), it wasn’t always pretty.

Over the years, things improved. Good, qualified developers got ahold of things and started making sense of it all and doing it in ways that made it much easier for hacks like me. One of those improvements (though it is many years old at this point) is a styling system known as Bootstrap. Styling is tricky in web development. Partially because it is just a little weird to interact with different settings and tags that make up web pages, but more so because different browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) can render things differently even with the same settings. To make things worse, the introduction of smart phones and tablets over the past decade or so has put a larger burden on developers to try to make things look good on many different sized screens. Bootstrap makes much of that easier.

Why now? I’ve known about and liked Bootstrap for quite some time now, but have avoided really getting to know it. When I did use it, I hacked around and eventually made things work, though not all that well. It was actually a project at work that pushed me into it this time, so it was fun to upgrade my blog and get paid for it…

In the end, knowing a tool like Bootstrap is no substitute for knowing good design, but it helps quite a bit. Being further handicapped with color-blindedness doesn’t help either! In short, if you have ideas for how the site could look better, let me know and I will see if I can improve my Bootstrap skills even further.