In Traction

The last couple of days I have been working on a new, fresh design for my homepage. It was quite hard, since I’m far from a good designer. I have to experiment a lot before I end up with something that I really like, while Luk for example can come up with something astounding within minutes. Then again my designs are standards compliant and designed with CSS positioning instead of table layouts

Almost all content has been migrated to jozilla.be. There are still a few files to be uploaded. In the next couple of days I will setup a redirect at my old homepage.

I’m glad I finally have a nice blog again. There’s some news concerning Uiml.net and Cassowary.net that has been in the queue for a while now.

Stay tuned!

One of the things I found annoying about Wordpress and Blogger was the lack of support for code snippets in blog posts.

The latest version of Typo has support for syntax highlighted code blocks using the syntax. Line numbers can also be displayed. Currently Ruby, Yaml and XML are supported, but as this feature gets more popular, other languages will probably be added. This macro uses Ruby’s Syntax module.

In other Typo-related news, the Typo Theme Contest is over. The results have been published. Although the winner is certainly a fantastic theme, my personal favorite is The Lucid. Unfortunately, it isn’t finished yet. I hope the author will have some spare time on his hands to complete his work.

Today me and Takis were discussing how mathematics courses could be made more interesting. I remembered once seeing a video lecture by Edsger Dijkstra in which he explained what has thrilled him mathematically. The theorems and algorithms he discussed (although not very difficult) prove that mathematics doesn’t have to be dull or boring. So I searched Google for Dijkstra lecture. What surprised me was that one of my old blog posts showed up as the second result. It’s a small web after all

This all started when I wanted to create a new blog.

Typo seemed impressive. However, it required Ruby on Rails, which wasn’t supported on Lumumba. I figured it would be cool to redesign my homepage with Rails as well, so that I could dynamically add content, and more tightly integrate my blog with the main website. The old homepage used a custom-made PHP templating system, which was only sufficient for small changes to the content.

Maybe getting a dedicated host would be the best thing to do. So I went through the list of web hosts supporting Rails. I came across sneaker.nl, a Dutch blog using Typo. We exchanged a few mails, and apparantly he was using DreamHost. After a couple of hours of comparing hosting plans, the choice was narrowed down to TextDrive, Planet Argon and DreamHost. DreamHost is really cheap for the web space and bandwidth it offers, but TextDrive and Planet Argon seemed more customizable, which I found very important. Unfortunately they are a bit expensive for my liking.

And then I stumbled upon Site5, which seemed to combine both enormous bandwidth and disk space with great support and reliability. I found a guide comparing Site5, DreamHost and TextDrive and a whole bunch of of Site5 reviews, of which the majority was positive.

Registering .be domains is free until January 31st, so I registered jozilla.be, and ordered a shared hosting plan at Site5.

And this blog post is the result My homepage still requires some migration work though.

I didn’t regret signing up at Site5. Their community forums are very helpful. Yesterday, I sent an email to support and received an answer within 7 minutes!