Yak Shaving

In the spirit of having spent way more time than I really should have futzing on the design and setup of this travel blog (you know, instead of writing about traveling), here’s a list of pointless colophon:

  • The site is open source and pretty much all the code is on Github. I also have a list of todos there.
  • The plan was always to have something map-centric. The final design is very close to my original splash pages from the beginning of the year.  It took so long to put this site up that my original map-tile provider, Cloudmade, basically shut down. I’ve switched to Mapbox, which is great so far.
  • Speaking of procrastination, I spent hours working on an attempt to implement dynamic background blurring but ended up abandoning the effort – it was way too hacky/fiddly.  You can check out the jsfiddle if you just want to see the effect.
  • I am dynamically generating my header from my last 4SQ checkin.
  • It’s been a while since I’ve done much FE work. This theme is based on Bones and should be pretty responsive. It’s also my first time using Sass (I’d previously used Less, so not a big leap). I was also ready to try Underscore,but Bones worked fine as skeleton – most of the work was trimming stuff off I didn’t need
  • I’m also using wp-geo for post-level geotagging, but not super happy with it, looking for something else that might do a better job of attaching GeoNames, WOEIDs, 4SQ locations, etc. (full plugin list)
  • WP-CLI is awesome and drastically simplifies upgrades, plugin installs, and other WordPress related BS
  • I will be porting and backdating some posts from my travel earlier this year as well as some pics.

OK, I think that’s enough yak shaving for a while. I’ll try keeping this stuff to a minimum, but futzing with the site/features is part of the fun, I suppose.

Completely unrelated, here’s a pic I took in Bali earlier this spring:

Monkey Model