Delta Tango Bravo

At the end of September, I departed from my position as creative director at Digg to pursue a new opportunity with my friends Cal and Stewart at Tiny Speck. The entire experience of leaving only the second real job I've had in my adult life has been bittersweet – I'm obviously excited to sink my teeth into something new but I'm sorely going to miss working with many fine people and friends at Digg.

On the sweet side, I've arranged to take a month off before I really get into my new gig. I haven't taken more than a week and a bit off work in almost a decade. This nice break is giving me a chance to recharge my batteries, take a week-long trip to Zion National Park in Utah with my girlfriend, and *drumroll* finally update this weblog!

This poor weblog has been collecting dust for quite some time and I've been heckled by friends (rightly so) to update it. This break between jobs has finally given me the opportunity to semi-complete a refresh of the site. There are still some improvements I'd like to make over the coming weeks, but the basic skeleton is firmly enough in place to make open the door and make this public.

A few notes for anyone that cares:

Sidebar changes

Part of the reason this site has been updated so infrequently is that I'm digging, tweeting, flickering, scrobbling, etc... instead of posting here. So, I've finally added syndication into the right rail of my weblog to reflect my broader activity. Follow me on any of those sites if you want to see specific types of updates.

Realigned theme

Although it was a bit dated, I still had quite a bit of affection for my previous theme. I really like Cameron Moll's articulation of 'realigning' instead of 'redesigning', which you can read on A List Apart. Hopefully this updated design is in the spirit of realignment. Some parts of this change are still a bit rough, but I'll continue to make improvements over the next few weeks.

Experimentation

The nice thing with personal sites is that not everything has to work or at least not work for everyone. For the Flickr images in the right rail, I'm using background-sizing for the first time (which works great in Safari/Chrome/Webkit and will be supported in the next release of Firefox). Elsewhere, I'm using css-inserted content, and some CSS3 selectors... things I wouldn't likely use much on professional work. Hopefully I'll be able to use this as a sandbox to try out things I may employ later elsewhere.

Degraded Support for IE6

This is the first project where I've basically cut out the css for IE6. As Dan Cederholm proposed back in February, I'm serving only a very stripped down stylesheet for IE6 and otherwise serving up nice, clean, and accessible unformatted html to that browser. I think it's a good choice for a personal site. If you're developing a consumer-facing site, I'd suggest you read Mark Trammell's important (and oft-misunderstood) post about Digg's altered stance on support for IE6.

Now for the hard part – actually posting here on a regular basis. We'll see how it goes, but I do intend to update this site on a much more frequently. I've got a book review and a few other posts already in the hopper. Heck, my posting here couldn't be any more irregular than it has been in the past, so what do I have to lose!

PS: In case you didn't already know, all of the universal symbol signs I'm using on this site are available for free from the AIGA.