Bob Ippolito (@etrepum) on Haskell, Python, Erlang, JavaScript, etc.
«

bob.ippoli.to, the blog formerly known as bob.pythonmac.org

»

It's been a while since I've updated this blog. Life intervened. I became annoyed with the blogging platform. I lost motivation. Twitter was a good enough outlet. The excuses aren't interesting, so I'll stop.

bob.ippoli.to

A few months ago I decided it was time to rebrand. The domain bob.pythonmac.org and the title from __future__ import * reflected one thing I was very interested in nearly a decade ago. I still like Python and I continue to use Mac as my workstation platform almost exclusively, but I also do a lot of other things. Since I'm pretty sure my name isn't going to change in the next decade or two, I decided to just go with bob.ippoli.to and drop the clever title.

Blogofile → GitHub Pages

I was no longer happy with my blogging platform. Blogofile was great at the time but maintaining a Python environment to run it became a chore over the years. I wanted to lower the barrier to posting for my future self as much as possible. GitHub Pages with its built-in Jekyll support was the solution I decided on. I still have the option to build it locally, but posting is just a git push away.

Jekyll-Bootstrap

Initially I thought I wanted to build something based on Bootstrap, so I stumbled upon Jekyll-Bootstrap which seemed like it would make that easy. After getting something working, I decided that Bootstrap wasn't a good fit. I could do something a lot simpler than that. I wanted an elegant and simple design that worked well on desktop and mobile. I'll probably end up stripping out the rest of the Jekyll-Bootstrap code since I don't benefit from its indirection.

Style

Inspired by Instapaper and zeldman.com I decided to modernize the HTML from Jekyll-Bootstrap and build a new theme CSS from scratch. Big text and bigger buttons. This took me a long time, I'm not a designer. I managed to get most of it done in Russia under an antibiotic haze during my recovery from a very gnarly case of tonsilitis. I had a lot of help from DocHub, Espresso (and espresso). CSS3 is really powerful and maybe even elegant, but it is not a very good example of DRY. If I had to do a lot of CSS, I think I'd have to switch to LESS or SCSS.

What's Next?

I'm not so sure what's next here. I've got a few months of notes that I made while working on Pieceable that I may try and organize. I've got a Random Choice talk that I gave at Moscow Erlang Factory Lite 2012 that I'd like to flesh out. I'm also starting at Facebook in about a week, and with that long bus commute I think I can make some time to write about my experience there.