Here it is... As I mentioned before (ok, none of you read that post before I wrote this one because that was a local post and I hadn't published the new site yet) I've been working on revamping my entire website, and I've dropped the old blog system and went completely static-html compiled with a JavaScript script on the server.

For starters, I'll make note of the features of the blog. Since you're looking at this right now it probably looks as if you're reading this out of a blog engine... After all, a recent posts list on the homepage, separate fancy url blog post pages, summaries, tag pages and a flexible sidebar, archives, rss and atom feeds, and there are even dynamic comments...

Nope, this blog is 100% static .html files no server-side language in sight (Ok, to be fair I do plan to create a single .php file to let me talk to the disqis api to have js display # comments links).

Everything here is generated completely using the same custom .js file that generates the rest of the website. With a separate section of code that uses the same template but also does a lot of extra stuff grouping posts into tags, archives, building lists that turn into summaryless items if there are more than 5 items, calculating tag clouds, sorting posts, generating feeds, and creating the sidebar.

All that post data is stored in a local posts/ folder with filenames in an easy yyyy-mm-dd-name.mkd format, where the content is a simple Markdown formatted file with an extra set of key: value pairs at the top to define things like title, name (the part that goes in the url), when it was posted, and optionally a syntax to highlight code with. And I have a quick ./blog bash script that lets me type in a command and create a new file with the current time and a name preloaded in a way that's easy to edit, and have it pop open in gedit automatically.

Now as for comments, that's handled externally using disqus.

^_^ Now to be honnest, this setup is even better than typo. Atom feed in addition to rss, no annoying editor issue, new tag cloud, summaries instead of full posts, I can easily write posts offline then publish them, I don't have strange hacks making things work, or parts of the ui that seam to be a little buggy, the comments have support for anon posts, openid login, twitter login plus ability to tweet, and disqus profiles (if anyone wants I could even add facebook connect; I just haven't since it requires a small extra few clicks arround to get a api key), I've fixed up the sidebar, and the skin is completely integrated.

And now onto the site itself. The blog uses the same template as the rest of the site, and the same set of styles and resources. I've changed the color scheme on the wikis site so it doesn't match the portfolio. Sidebar color now uses the background color for the current theme as the link hover color instead of the same blue as the background in the profile site. Text shadowing has been added. I've added some nice transparencies (I'm using rgba() in a way that it'll smoothly fallback to solid colors on older browsers). And I've made a very nice elegant improvement to the background with some smooth animation (I could even try using something like window.name to make things smoother).

Additionally I've also updated the content a bit. ChimpDB is gone, but Wrench.js is up. I've added some links to work projects (though the actual systems are not publicly viewable yet), And I've added two new pages to my profile, including my media collection so family have a better idea of what to get as a gift.