#website

New Year, New Theme

To ring in 2019, I’m changing this blog’s theme to Twenty Nineteen, the new default WordPress theme, designed and primarily created by my excellent colleague, Allan Cole (check out his music, published as The Stuyvesants, they’re groovy).

Apart from being pretty similar to, but a nice upgrade from the previous theme here, Twenty Nineteen also harnesses the full power of Gutenberg, the new WordPress Block Editor. I’m going to convert some posts to blocks so that I can use some of the better gallery options and whatnot, and will be using Gutenberg for everything going forward. It also reminds me a bit of the styling used throughout Instapaper, which I’ve spent a lot of time in lately 🙂

Happy New Year!

Dented Reality on New Dedicated Virtual at Media Temple

https://beau.blog/2017/05/dented-reality-on-new-dedicated-virtual-at-media-temple/

I’ve completed the migration of beaulebens.com (along with all my other domains, excluding this one) to a new dedicated virtual server with Media Temple. Mad props to them, they’ve been great in helping me handle some pieces of the process, which has gone relatively smoothly. Things I’m looking forward to on the new host include:

  • Working with Plesk Onyx
  • Trying out Let’s Encrypt 🔐
  • PHP 7 😍
  • Hopefully consolidating and simplifying some things

This site (beau.blog) is now my main blogging/writing space, with Dented Reality being more of a full archive of my digital footsteps.

10 Year Blogoversary!

10 years ago today, I posted my first blog post on this site. That’s pretty much forever on the internet, and I think it probably also makes me old. A lot has changed in the last decade, both on this website, and for me personally (and the world at large). Let’s have a quick look shall we?

beaulebens.com

When I first created this website, I was using a little tool called blosxom to manage the blog. It was a tiny little Perl script that pulled the contents of your blog from text files on your filesystem. Pretty awesome, nerdy stuff. Dented Reality also looked something like this, pretty hot huh?

dented-2003

(more…)

Announcing: SidewalkScribbl.es

I’ve launched a new website that you might like to check out: SidewalkScribbl.es

It feels like every time I walk around in San Francisco (and other places), I see all this cool artwork, quotes, stencils etc on the sidewalk that I’m sure a lot of people are missing or not appreciating. SidewalkScribbl.es will be a place to share those things. The site will most likely get a facelift to make things look better, but in the meantime I’m just getting started with some of the things I’ve already collected from around the place.

Keep an eye out for another *Scribbl.es site soon 😉

Dented Reality v5.0

You’re now looking at (I think) the fifth major revision of this website.

It’s been a (long) time coming, but I finally got it online today. I thought it would be fitting. It is a day of change after all. It’s definitely time for a change here at Dented Reality — the previous version was online for around 5 years (April 20, 2003 according to the WayBack Machine). I think it stood up quite well considering the changes that took place in the browser landscape in those 5 years.

Dented Reality v4.0

Dented Reality v4.0

You may notice that there are a number of new posts here, which just magically appeared. That’s because I was posting while I was developing this site on my laptop, but I didn’t want to post to the old site. For the record, here are all the posts that are new as of today (oldest to newest):

There are going to be a lot of small tweaks to be done still, and I’m sure there are some broken links etc, but I think this version is quite a step up from the previous one. It reflects a change in direction for the site and I think does a better job of showing who I am and what sort of projects I engage in.

Dented Reality v5.0

Dented Reality v5.0

Comments are now open (and powered by IntenseDebate), so please feel free to leave a note on what you think of the new site on this post!

And Then It Was Live!

Yes, I finally got my new site live, and it all appears to be working, including the new and fancy, blosxom-driven “Notes” section.

This has taken quite a bit of work to get live, but I am quite happy with the way that things have turned out. The main addition(s) that I want to make at this stage are writebacks on my Notes section, so that I can hear what you guys out there have to say about things, rather than this being a 1-way only information device 🙂

Keep an eye out for the ability to comment on my postings here in the nearish future (hopefully!). When I get it working, it should also allow for trackbacks, so you can register comments on my posts on your own blogs if you like

Ho Ho Ho…

Christmas morning and I’m on the computer already… sad? dedicated? driven?… bored. Still working away on the new site, so hopefully it will be done before too long.

Interesting question from a friend last night regarding how much time I spend on my own projects & websites – he asked me to explain “why you’re putting in so much work into it”. My answer wasn’t that thorough or convincing, but, I believe that there are a number of things you can get out of running a website like mine.

  1. Honing of personal skills: building this site gave me a chance to work out a complex CSS/XHTML layout, while integrating a dynamic content management system and honing a search system!
  2. Giving something back: considering how much the web community has given me in the form of code, knowledge, skills, tips & tricks, this site is a minor return-favour
  3. Educating people: building information on this site gives me a focus point where I can send current and potential clients to find out about IA, usability and general user-centred design.
  4. Publicise my projects: making a site which people like to come back to gives me a place where I can promote my projects and get them out in the public
  5. Raise my profile: no point beating around the bush, one of the reasons I maintain an active website is that it raises my profile in the web community/industry. These days anything that can do that for you without spending a truckload of money is a Good Thing.