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Apr242015
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Responsive Design |
My writings here often open with my disinclination to write here. There would have been at least a few things to write about over the last 26 months. I left WVUE-TV in December 2013 after four years in the newsroom. In early 2014 I dated one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever laid eyes on, which was as enjoyable as it was astonishing. Back in October, I bought a new car.
Neglecting this log despite all that is perfectly fine, but I’ve done myself a disservice neglecting the website itself for the last five years Mobile web browsing was already quite popular with I rebuilt Mr. B’s Domain in 2010, but I decided to skip the hassle. Now it’s nearly ubiquitous is the western world, with just about everybody surfing on smartphones and tablets. Elsewhere in the world, mobile web browsing has outpaced desktop browsing for years.
That state of affairs and a piece of advice I read finally gave me the motivation to revisit the issue: “Always have a project.” I spent a lot of time last month reading up on how mobile web development has evolved since I was last paying attention to such things. It’s now ridiculously easy to code your own website that works across platforms. CSS has allowed screen-specific rules for several years, but their implementation has since been packaged in easy to use “frameworks” like Bootstrap and Foundation.
I decided to use Bootstrap to build the latest iteration of Mr. B’s Domain. I still hand-coded everything, but downloading this “template” gave me a massive head start. One downside is the excessive overhead involved. Bootstrap has about 150 kB of CSS out of the box. I cut that down significantly in the course of completing version 10, but I can probably do more. The only other issue is my website now looks an awful lot like many other websites also built with the framework. There’s a new homogeny on the web as developers crank out Bootstrap websites for their clients by the thousand. I’ve made some effort to combat that as well, and hopefully I’ll maintain interest in the months to come.
One other objective with this new website is to further shift its focus to my amateur photography. It’s the one trickle of updates that has continued without interruption for the last 10 years. My newest albums now dominate the home page. Moving forward, each new one should have an article to match. This writing comes mere hours before Jazz Fest 2015 begins. I’ll probably be adding 1,500 photos to the website over the next two weekends. Hopefully I can add half as many words.