I’m referring specifically to my blog, which was becoming a complete mess of ugliness and broken HTML. I decided to completely gut it, remove a bunch of useless crap and focus on making the content clean and easy to read. This is pretty much a warm-up exercise for the coming week of writing docs and putting out the new YARD site, but it’s something I should have done long ago. Hopefully this will give me some new incentive to write more (about YARD?)

It’s not a “blog” anymore

You may have noticed that comments are gone. Good. Comments are often useful, but to be honest, like many other “bloggers”, I’ve discovered they often don’t add much to the conversation (I rarely get comments on my blog anyway, so styling all that HTML is a waste of my time). A lot of people will say a site is “not a blog” if it does not allow a two-way conversation between the author and the reader. Fine, then I guess this is no longer a blog. My intention for writing articles is not to inherently start a conversation or get feedback. I write because I want to share, not because I need validation or care that you think I’m a dumbass. Don’t get me wrong, I still like when people point out errors and omissions or insert points of view, so if you notice anything send me an email or twitter me instead, we can have the discussion there. Better yet, reply with your own article. This keeps the conversation sane, civil and keeps the signal-to-noise ratio down. I’ve noticed this trend from other blogs I visit, and I’m starting to think the future of blogging will look a lot more like magazine articles than threaded conversations. Dialog is good, but it should be controlled so that it remains on topic and relevant.

I mentioned Twitter is a good way to reach me. I’ve actually been using it a lot for the past 6 months; a lot more than this blog. It’s no surprise that microblogging is way easier than writing long articles, so for the past few months my Twitter account has probably been a better source of blog content than my blog (I guess this is probably why people like Tumblr). Let’s be honest, I’m probably not going to start blogging much more than I already do, but I can keep up with Twitter pretty well. Because of this, I’ve incorporated my Twitter feed into my blog and it’s prominently displayed on the front page and in the sidebar on others. I didn’t just add it as a widget to fill whitespace. Instead, expect that feed to be a major source of content for this site. Though you should probably just follow me.

Anyway, enough about me. Hope you like the new design.

Adobe Labs released a great colour scheme tool a while back called Kuler that allows you to create great looking colour schemes really quick.

Colour scheme tools like this usually cost $30+, but this one is free, comes with pretty much all of the functionality you could possibly need, and supports up to 5 colours (you probably don’t need more). You can even publish, share and rate schemes from other users. Did I mention it’s free?

Adobe has their problems (and inherited some too, cough, Flash), but it’s safe to say they’re an authority in the world of 2D graphics tools and this site definitely lives up to the name.