The Attic

This is my attic (or more accurately, "the loft", since I'm english!), where I keep all my old designs of this blog. Each new design has a screenshot which links through to an archived front page from that time. Enjoy!

2006

This was the my first design straight from a wordpress theme, called Unsleepable v16. I remember customising it quite a bit with plugins, in particular with my own last.fm plugin. As you might see from the tag cloud, jQuery and TextMate were very much central to my development and my blogging!

2007

The second off-the-shelf wordpress design, this time from an author calling themselves Digital Disease, and the theme was called Illacrimo. I'm fairly sure I saw someone else's blog with this theme and liked it. It was a bit heavy on the eyes, and very narrow, which is why it didn't last long.

2008

Entirely my own design (for better or worse), I remember working on this design on my commute back and forth to London, with limited knowledge of CSS and struggling with the hanging title images (and blog date).

The background image (which has stayed with me for the last 8 years) was made in Pixelmator, and to this day, I've no idea how to re-create it, but it represented what I wanted: a sort of visualisation of code (and my blog's content)—sharp hard edges, lots of blocks of information, all twisting away.

2014

I finally made an effort to tighten up the design of my blog and word towards simplicity and legibility, removing a lot of the sidebar widgets and distractions.

This design also retrofitted a responsive design on top of what I already had, so now it looked great at any device width (or so I think!).

This was also the shift away from WordPress based blog and running entirely off my own code, and pushing all the source content directly into GitHub.