New Cards, The Benefits of Reading out Loud, Switching to Jekyll and more

This week has been a fervent flurry of activity as I prepare for starting my new job next week.

So, here’s what I’ve been up to.

Chip Shop new design

The Chip Shop website has the beginnings of a new design that is supposed to represent an 80s retro computer, well sort of, I’m sure you will get the point. The site is also now generally responsive, but unfortunately I need to tweak a few things to get the custom fonts rendering on mobile. I also wanted to ensure that the introductory page of the website explained what the project actually was a little better.

New Chip Shop cards

I have added a lot of new event cards this week, all of which are based upon relevant occurrences to the industry in the 80s. Again, these cards are very bare bones at the moment, but hopefully you will see where they are going.

One Day the World Ends switches to Jekyll

As outlined in this post I had initially started developing the website for the ODTWE project in Ruby on Rails as I wanted to learn the language. However, with my time now being more precious I want to keep things simple for now and develop that site full in the future. So, I have switched the site to Jekyll for now, the infamous static site generator. This fits very well with my writing workflow from Scrivener, exported to Markdown and then straight into a site deployment. As I start adding new features and media content, the project may out grow Jekyll, but it works well for now. I was able to migrate the site in less than two hours, which shows how simple it is.

The benefits of reading out loud

On Sunday I read a draft of a new chapter from One Day the World Ended at a spoken word night in Leipzig. I have always found reading out loud an effective (if nerve racking) method for getting a reaction and the feeling of a piece. As a result of this reading I noticed a few errors, areas that needed expansion, areas that needed reducing and areas that didn’t make sense to anyone but me. Expect this chapter, that covers the story of Alf online soon.

Merging in the Chris Chinchilla blog

Again, as a result of starting a new job, I eventually did decide to merge my Chris Chinchilla AngularJS site into a section of this site. I will continue development of this site in the background and rerelease it when ready. As a result of merging my personal blog I added some static pages such as how to contact me and my work experience, I still feel these are slightly out of place, but they will do for now. Finally I added links to some of my main social profiles, I will be re-adding more as well as my old social aggregate feed page soon.

Bootstrap vs Drupal Breakpoints

As a consequence of a lot of the changes mentioned in the last paragraph I decided to take the opportunity to fix several layout issues, specifically regarding responsive issues. This became something of a nightmare, especially on deployment. I had been using the context breakpoint module to hide and show blocks at various breakpoints. The module seemed promising, but proved very unreliable and inconsistent and I finally decided to just disable it. Instead I opted to use the Bootstrap responsive utilities and implement the responsive layout with Bootstrap functionality instead of Drupal. This is often an issue when using complex technology stacks, various components fight against each other and can hinder you instead of help you. Whilst I feel like I have wasted way too much time on battling this particular point of contrition, I now feel far better placed having identified and removed it.

This will likely be the last technology updates for a while and I will be focussing more on content creation. I am well aware of several usability and design issues still present in the sites, but content is a greater priority for me over the coming months.