natebates.com

apologies to khoi vinh

Well, the blog is up and the design is underway.

SubtractionRight now it’s looking way too similar to Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction, but I hope to be creating my own unique spin on it as soon as I get some inspiration.

See, I started with Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme, changed a couple light greys to dark greys, and boom, I had a Subtraction clone.

It’s not my intention to rip anyone off and I’m hoping that I can modify my theme so that it’s not a stolen design. I’ve only recently been exposed to grid design so it might take me a while to get a hang of its intricacies. I mean, I’ve always had a decent feel for laying things out in an organized manner, but it’s interesting to see actual specific rules behind design techniques. Grid design has been used on the web for a while (and for longer in print), and it may no longer be “cool”, but I don’t need many fancy graphics for a blog and I really like the minimalism of many grid-based designs.

Theming WordPress is pretty simple and perhaps I should’ve done my own design from the start. I was a little intimidated, though, since my last experience with CMS was with Drupal and creating a theme for Prime Health Solutions at my old job. That project was a little tricky since we were customizing everything a lot, but WordPress is improving my opinion of CMS’s. Perhaps that’s because WordPress was designed to facilitate exactly what I’m trying to create: a simple blog.

I’ll keep tweaking this blog’s theme and hopefully I can come up with something a little more original. Right now my main concern is to make it complete and consistent, apologies to Khoi Vinh during the process.

in the beginning…

Well, I’ve deleted my whole website and replaced it with WordPress. The goal is to have a website that I keep current, hopefully this will be part of the solution.

The next struggle will be deciding exactly what I want this blog to be. I want to showcase some tech stuff, but also want to share personal stuff with my friends… I guess I’ll figure it out as I go — wish me luck!