This blog suffers, like many, from periodic abandonment. The latest six-month absence has seen me return to Singapore from Manila, and put in process the formation of a company. As well as get through a shedload of work.

Thus the need to somewhat extricate myself from the deepcalm.com = me equation, as I’m hoping to expand somewhat over the next year or two. So welcome to andycroll.com, the new home of me.

The exercise has allowed me to do a few things:

1. Revisit old articles – where information on plugins or techniques is old hat or possibly out of date, I’ve added information to the articles in question.
2. Reviews – I’ve just binned them, no-one cares apart from me. If I’ve got something to say about a movie, I’ll say it on my twitter.
3. Links have been somewhat overtaken by my use of Twitter as well, I also pull my delicious feed into friendfeed meaning any commentary tend to happen in there.
4. Redesign – The ultimate aim of every web designer seems to be constant reinvention of their own site. Now I get to do two. Yes this is a partner site to the new deepcalm.com coming “when it’s done”.

So in effect it’s totally streamlined the experience of the writing. Any work I do will continue to be posted on the business’ site. And all ephemera will get posted to services that are useful for that sort of thing.

Meaning the content here will be me talking about running a business and the semi-regular programming, CSS and Mac related tips that form the main bulk of the site before. And I’m going to start being a bit more rigorous with myself on the posting front as well as getting more involved with the local Singapore scene.

The Design

I’ve been inspired by the work of Tim Van Damme on his business card site but I wanted to keep the blog here. So you’re initially presented with the business card site and then thanks to the power of JQuery you get the latest articles.

The original ‘amalgam’ site has always had a white background, and the redesign will be heading that direction too (people like the rainbow) so I figured why not a dark, virtually typographic only design for my own site. It’s intended as a companion piece to the business site, so expect to see some layout similarities.

Design details-wise, I’ve composed the typography to a vertical rhythm and used the best possible ampersand. Plus I used some splendid icons from jwloh and shrunk some iPhone-style icons as well.

I’ve used alpha transparency extensively in the new design as the traffic for this site is likely to be mainly fellow developers. I can put up with a slightly less glamourous version of the site in Internet Explorer; because I don’t use it.

A note on Textpattern

I’ve gone back to the wonderful simplicity of Textpattern (from Expression Engine) as I’ve been using it extensively in recent work. I’ll probably be using the same platform for the rejigged business site as well.

The previous build in EE was an interesting educational exercise and stands it in good stead for complex sites that aren’t Rails projects but for a simple site or blog there is simply no competition for me. Wordpress I’m sure is terrific, but I’m using the tool with which I’m comfortable.

Plus I should note I’ve been pushing the bounds of Textpattern recently, the project at Arvesund introduced me to the Multiple Language Pack, a quite stunning piece of Textpattern plugin mastery. More on that another time perhaps.

Teething

I’m sure some of you have had my feed redirect in an annoying fashion watching two year old articles reappear, but I’m afraid it had to be done to break the bond between blog and business.

It’s live now and works in ‘good browsers’ I’ll now go and see the monstrosity that IE has rendered.

Here’s to a new era and (yet another) redesign. I must be getting up to double figures…