Redesign!

I’m excited to be writing my first post on my redesigned personal website. I’ve been working on it for the last week, and it has a few improvements:

• Blogging. This design puts blogging front and center. I did this mainly so I can blog about my exciting summer ahead, helping build the future of K-12 school analytics at Panorama Education. I plan to blog about all sorts of tech and entrepreneurship topics that come up over the summer.

• Responsive. The previous design was pretty hard to use from a mobile device, so I designed the site to be responsive this time around. It was my first foray into responsive design, and I think it turned out alright. I enjoyed the typographical parts of responsive design, like keeping line lengths within the right range (apparently the rule of thumb is 50-75 characters).

  But it was also frustrating to lose exact control over some of the visual elements – it takes far more effort to create a unique design if you want it to be responsive.

  I’m using the great Montserrat typeface for headings, and the solid Open Sans for everything else.

• Better site generator. I was previously using the Ruby-based static site generator Nanoc to build my personal site, and switched to Middleman for this version. Both do similar things, but Nanoc was really starting to annoy me with the way it worked (see this HN comment) and I like how Middleman works much better.

Look forward to many more posts over the next few months and beyond! I’ll also add Disqus comments and import the posts from my old blog over here at some point.