Wow. Version 7? Really? I finished the first design of LuzCannon.com on July 24, 2005, and six years and a few days later I put the finishing touches on Version 7. And when I say finishing touches I mean that in the lightest sense of the word.

This version does something that I’ve never attempted before, and something I’ve never seen on another blog. This time around, I built in a way to change it as time goes on. Not automatically though… but as I go I can swap out the background artwork dynamically as I create bigger and better generative systems.

What Am I Going On About?

Well, on the main page, the photo galleries, most of the non-article pages, there are a series of boxes being drawn randomly with a set of subdued grays using Artisan JS. But, when you hover over something that needs to be emphasized, the background can shift and change colors based on what you’re hovering. When you move the mouse off of it, the background changes back to the gray scheme.

In the future, I’ll be writing newer things and I’ll switch the background art out accordingly.

Unique Article Designs

I also kept the feature where I can design an article to stand alone, and I hope to write more that fit that pattern. So, as I write about bands, my adventures in photography and as life goes on, I can style a single page according to the mood I need to convey. Adding in the above feature where I can add Canvas and scripting to an article could come into play, too, if there’s a good reason.

Technologically Speaking…

This time around, I took a step back and evaluated what I wanted from my personal site. I had decided to use Drupal almost a year ago, but right after I switched I felt as if I had stepped up the time required to maintain it. And that shouldn’t be read as complaint about Drupal, but a statement about how much I love TextPattern for smaller projects. I’ll continue to endorse Drupal for my larger projects, especially community driven or e-commerce projects, but for this site at least I’m back on TextPattern. (DavidNBrooks.com is still on Drupal, and probably will stay that way until I decide there’s a good reason to switch it back to TextPattern.)

Thanks to Google, there are tons of free fonts available for use in our sites. I’ve been using their selection for some of my unique articles but I also needed a few more typefaces that weren’t available for free. To grab those, I put my Typekit account to good use and, it’s made things a whole lot nicer.

More to Come

It feels really nice to have this launched. I’ve been holding off on some writing lately, and I can’t wait to get back to publishing regularly. I still have a few things to do on this site before it’s 100%, but I felt like if I didn’t launch it now it could be another six months before I did.

But, if you’re not already, subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with what’s going on around here. I promise that I’ll try to keep it at least entertaining.

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