I’ll be moving the blog from Blogger to GitHub Pages in the next couple of weeks and I’ll be putting the atom feed at a different address. To make sure you keep getting updates from Growing with the Web, resubscribe to the Feedburner URL. This will allow me to switch over the backing feed when the time comes.
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Friday, 13 December 2013
How to remove the default Blogger assets
WARNING This is a tutorial designed for expert web developers, following this tutorial can break the template customiser, layout customiser and prevent widgets from being added to your blog. Your blog may also depend on them if you haven't heavily customised the template.
The default Blogger assets have plagued me ever since I started to dive deep into the Blogger template to make my design nicer and to drive the page load time down. A Blogger template requires several tags in the <head> and the editor will refuse to apply the template without them, namely this section.
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/> <b:skin> <![CDATA[/* ----------------------------------------------- Blogger Template Style Name: Some name Designer: Some author URL: Some URL ----------------------------------------------- */ ...A lot of CSS... ]]> </b:skin> <b:template-skin> <b:variable default='960px' name='content.width' type='length'/> <b:variable default='0' name='main.column.left.width' type='length'/> <b:variable default='310px' name='main.column.right.width' type='length'/> <![CDATA[ ...A lot of CSS... ]]> </b:template-skin>
Saturday, 24 August 2013
GitHub and my plans for the blog
Due to the issues of effectively source controlling the code on my blog using Blogger's text editor and Google Drive, I've gone ahead and extracted most of the code samples into a GitHub project for your viewing and forking pleasure.
I believe a blog post shouldn't be a write once, leave forever thing. It should be alive and keep up with the times, otherwise it could spread misinformation. Having my code samples source controlled will enable me to improve code or fix up old code much more easily.
Future plans
Another idea I've been toying with for the last few months is to redo all my posts in markdown and I've started to implement my plan starting with this post. Not only is this far nicer than editing the raw HTML or using the WYSIWYG editor that Blogger provides, it will also allow me to transition off of Blogger far more easily when the time comes.
Thursday, 22 August 2013
Coming to America
I'll be moving to Seattle, Washington with my wife in a couple of weeks as I've accepted a position at Amazon! I will be joining the AWS team to work on the Kindle's cloud-powered browser Silk. Needless to say I'm super excited to get into it :)
This is the reason for my being a little quiet on the blog recently; organising everything to move overseas. I hope to continue blogging after moving, though probably not quite as much as I have been over the last year. I will also be able to start up my Korean study again which I took a little break from to focus on work stuff.
Sunday, 12 May 2013
One year
Tags:
Blogging
Just over a year has passed since I created my blog and I just wanted to reflect a little on how I feel everything has gone, the impact it's had on my life and go over the most popular posts to date.
Getting stuff done
My life has changed so much over the past year, on both a personal level and professional. I created my blog because I wanted to be better at what I do, I found it to be an incredible motivational tool especially since I made a commit to myself (and others) about posting. When I started, I wanted to post at least once a week and I ramped that up to twice a week in the middle as I felt I could do more. I mostly kept my promises which I'm very happy about and it just illustrates the power of blogging and making things public.
If you have been following me for a whole you probably could guess I also promised myself to brush up on my algorithms and data structures also. During the past year I read The Algorithm Design Manual cover to cover which taught me a lot and really changed the way that I develop software, I used to struggle determining an algorithm's time complexity for example but now it's a piece of cake.
I also released my first app on the Play Store, a widget to aid in Korean language vocabulary acquisition built primarily for myself. I have another app which I've been working on but I've put it on hold due to other work.
I became active on Stack Overflow and had a great time in the process, it's such a cleverly designed system how it encourages good/helpful behaviour by making it fun. I went really hard at this for a while managing to rack up a whopping 468 points on one day.
Saturday, 12 January 2013
Blog redesign #2
I only just redesigned the blog back in September, but something has been bugging me since around a week after I did it. The readability completely sucked, I found myself preferring Google Reader or the Blogger backend over reading from the blog itself! Not good...
So I spent a bit of time here and there over the last month or so getting the design just right and then ramping up towards the end with the implementation. I used SASS this time as the changes being made were pretty significant. Here are the results.
So I spent a bit of time here and there over the last month or so getting the design just right and then ramping up towards the end with the implementation. I used SASS this time as the changes being made were pretty significant. Here are the results.
Saturday, 29 September 2012
New design!
I decided to give the blog a major overhaul and redesign the template as previously it was just using a one of the built-in Blogger templates with a few minor alterations. I was originally quite hesitant in modifying the template directly as I didn't really understand how it was put together, the blog has been in place for some time now so I thought it was about time to give it a go.
Most of the redesign was done last week, this week I went through and fixed up all the old posts and a few minor issues that revealed themselves with the styles.
Most of the redesign was done last week, this week I went through and fixed up all the old posts and a few minor issues that revealed themselves with the styles.
Saturday, 9 June 2012
Using google-code-prettify in your blog
Until now to make my source code pretty I've used a pretty dodgy method that involved going from Visual Studio to Word to Blogger and surrounding the lot in a div to apply some styles to the whole thing. This has resulted in HTML source looking something like this:
<div style="background-color: #f0f0f0; border: 1px dashed #CCCCCC;"> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">position</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">fixed</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">top</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">50%</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">left</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">50%</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">width</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">200px</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">height</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">150px</span>;<o:p></o:p></span></div> <div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;"> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">margin-top</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt;">:<span style="color: blue;">-75px</span>; <span style="color: darkgreen;">/* negative half height */</span><o:p></o:p></span></div> <span style="color: red; font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">margin-left</span><span style="font-family: Consolas; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 115%;">:<span style="color: blue;">-100px</span>; <span style="color: darkgreen;">/* negative half width */</span></span></div>Disgusting I know, not only does it look gross but it also makes it a lot more difficult to work on posts using my mobile. So I decided to look into a prettyprint alternative, I found google-code-prettify as one of the first search results and went into investigate. It is a very simple process to get it up and running using the following steps: