Blog blog blog, blog blog blog

I’ve been a lazy blogger still. It’s quite sad, at least once a day I come up with a rant that I say to myself “Hey that would make a great blog post”, and yet I never put pen to paper… or fingers to keyboard as it were.

I’m working on that. However I have done some blog facelifts and improvements to hopefully re-inspire myself to do the writing that I really love.

First up the primary font has now been changed to Helvetica Neue Light, it’s really a gorgeous typeface. Likely this will still render as Arial on Windows desktops. Heck, it even renders different on Safari vs Firefox side by side on the same laptop. I really pity real web designers, doing a cross-platform pixel perfect UI in HTML 5 would be an exercise in pain and maybe impossibility.

I also changed some spacing and cleaned the general layout ever so slightly. There should be an extra line (or line and a half) of text on each page now.

I’ve also changed the ‘large’ image size that WP pre-crunches to be 600px instead of 1000px. I’ll be able to have full width images without breaking the layout now, however legacy images are all going to be the defaults. Over all I think it’s a definite improvement to readability and aesthetics, quite pleased with my cave-man with two sticks CSS efforts. Through a couple years of tweaking and modifying, the site is quite far from the original WP theme I bought. I’ve now changed the name of the blog from ‘nick@kavassalis.com’ to ‘nick@’, the kavassalis.com is now implied :P

The next major change is that I’ve “moved” the hosting of the blog to CloudFlare. CloudFlare offers free and lunatic-cheap CDN services as well as inline HTML optimization and security. The tech seems awesome, and it came with a glowing endorsement from Brandon.

I plan to use kavassalis.com as a bit of a test bed for other projects. Sadly it won’t be the best data, page views are pretty low compared to the 4-digit unique view days (and even a occasional 5-digit!), I’ll have to write something really controversial again…

I really love the tech, and I recommend reading up on what they offer. My only wonder is how they’ll make money at their current pricing. It’s wild value for the money compared to any other CDNs I know. Wild isn’t a strong enough word. It seems insane. But hey, maybe they have a really cost effective network (affordable hardware & colo, tons of peering?) and that’s their genius. I’ll definitely write more about my experiences in the future.