Start blogging for real with John Sonmez

This is it; my first post after the launch of my redesigned blog.

This is kind of special for me. I've been wanting to redesign my blog for a while now, using more advanced front-end techniques and “cool” tools.

I also have been following John Sonmez's email course on how to start your own blog. Sure, I already had one. But I needed some motivation and guidance to keep it going and take it to the next level. John gave me both.

Update, 24.04.2015

So, I graduated from John's blogging course!

I'm really happy I took it, as well as taking the time to blog on a regular basis. Thanks John!

Getting back on track

If you have no blog yet, or, like me, have one and struggle with it, I urge you to subscribe to John's email course. It's free, it's simple, and packed with superb advice. I'm going to put all of it into practice for a few months and see how it goes. I'm super motivated, and have a long list of topics (about Drupal) just waiting to get some attention.

Redesigned and super-fast

My previous design was already pretty light-weight and fast. I love simplicity and speed, so these two elements are always top priority whenever I build things.

But it wasn't enough. I wondered if I could get my average page weight under 100kb, and use techniques like AJAX and Pushstate to speed up page loads even more

Turns out, it is possible. And you are looking at it. I ditched any third-party libraries unless they added real value to my site (goodbye jQuery and plugins, hello custom Modernizr build and vanilla Javascript). I used Gulp to streamline the building process, automating aggregation and minification of all resources, HTML included. I still use Jekyll as my static site generator and Compass for my SCSS; and use both in conjunction with Gulp.

The site is responsive, uses CSS3 for animations, makes good use of modern Javascript, while gracefully degrading in older browsers.

Of course, all of this is open source and available on Github. Go check it out; I'd love your feedback.

What to expect next

I'm committing myself to writing more frequently and share my knowledge of Drupal development and project management. I'll focus a lot on front-end Drupal development, as that's where the heart is.

Stay tuned!