80x80
I said Friday but I meant Monday. Sometimes things take longer but in my case I just wanted to compete for attention the same day Digg 3 launched. All amusement aside I’d like to take the plastic wrap off my new site that I’ve dubbed 80x80.
It’s been a long time coming and I’ve finally got something I’m proud of. She’s still stretching herself out so if you notice any kinks let me know and I’ll call the masseuse. You’ll see the Lab grow soon into a dumping ground for prototypes and ideas. To keep things lively the artwork above will change as frequently as possible. You may notice the death of my tags, sorry, I opted for a clear set of categories. Portfolio is simple and should provide a glimpse of my contributions. Resume is, well, a resume.
That said, I’d like to say a few words on the nuts and bolts. I’ve parted ways with Rails. I enjoy Ruby immensely, it’s a beautiful language and I highly recommend it for those of you building web apps. However, while I wear many hats, none of them include web app developer. My largest hat is information designer. I spoon feed content to people in a stimulating fashion in hopes of planting a brand seed in their brain, thats all. After a few weeks of tinkering around I realized Django was my new muse. In less than a weekend I had a prototype for this site which allowed me to focus directly on usability, design and content while eliminating time towards an admin tool. Ruby on Rails made programming fun again but Django liberated me from back-end development.
I would like to give a big thanks to Jeff Croft, Wilson Miner, and those that maintain Django for their glowing examples clear documentation. If you’d like to learn more there are a couple great videos by Adrian and Jacob on Google. Thats all for now. I’m excited and I hope everyone else is too.
Comments
Jeff Croft http://www.jeffcroft.com/
Sweet jesus, man. This is beautiful! How you picked up Django in that short of a time I have no idea, but my God man. Wow.
Awesome. Just awesome.
Matt Croydon
Wow, you’re making Jeff look bad over here, and he picked up django right quick.
Well done!
Wilson Miner http://www.wilsonminer.com
Damn, man. I love this design. And not just because some of the corners feel familiarish. It’s really beautifully executed, down to the last detail. And I think you win the “fastest time from learning Django to launching a blog” race since you didn’t even have Jacob and Matt sitting next to you to help you out. Well done, all around.
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
Thanks guys. Having drank the Rails Kool-aid made figuring out the Django essentials a lot easier. Not to mention all the wonderful examples and documentation. I’ve never seen such beautifully written documentation before, very well done.
Jeff Croft http://www.jeffcroft.com/
Out of curiosity, Nathan…did you have Django inspect your old Rails DB and use it, or did you migrate content over to a new DB?
Either way, I’m still astonished at how fast you did all this. I keep coming back to this site all day long, trying to figure out which bits I can steal without being terribly obvious. :)
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
I actually migrated everything over to a new database. The old DB was pretty nutty and wouldn’t transition easily. It relies on some one-to-one relationships and since Django’s one-to-one support is being retooled I wanted to wait before I try to recreate my old structure.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.” If Picasso says so :)
Jacob Sullivan
This is a really beautiful site. I want badly to fool around with Django — generic views and the like seem wonderful — but I’m still trying to wrap my head around getting it up and running on my server…
Nathan Borror http://www.playgroundblues.com/
Jacob, thanks. If you trying to use Django with FastCGI, Jeff Croft has an excellent post on how he got it running on Dreamhost. I don’t have much experience using mod_python.
Tyson
I’ll add my name to to slobbering praise list. Very clean and beautiful. Awesome.
Frank Chimero http://www.frankchimero.com
The site looks great Nathan. Looks like you were designing it like the web page was a physical printed page. Nice and squeeky clean. Mucho pats on the back.
sandro
Great use of colors, your design is very pleasing, well done.
I read a post you wrote in 2005 regarding using tags on your site, but it seems “a clear set of categories” was more conducive to a beautiful design and greater usability (compare to the usability of these tags). When you wrote your 2005 post you championed tags because they “evolve” and as I see it, allow you to describe your post in the greatest detail possible. Tags were useful on flickr because they let you narrow your focus within an extremely large set of photos. But now you have abondoned tags, any details on why?
Are tags a mechanism that only work within social websites? True, they have the freedom to evole, but can bloggers handle that freedom? Is it helpful to have a post about CSS background images to have the tags “css | xhtml | design” or is it better to place that post under the category “webdesign”?
I like your categories but I want to know what you think about ‘em