It has been a very long time since my last post, ignoring almost any online social activity and not having too much free time for visual experimentation and self study, but finally find some time to finish the new look of my site. Actually is not only a new look, but a completely reworked and redesigned site from ground up. The previous version was based on Wordpress. I liked the flexibility and easy to use feature of Wordpress, which in essence could be to reduce to a two-step workflow: search for a theme, install it and you are good to go.

BTW this is the logo of my site designed by myself

I was thinking from time to time, to give some personality to my site, meaning trying to keep myself distant from WP, maybe using only the backend part for content upload, post editing and any other content management activity.

Searching for WP alternatives I found roots.io and Octopress the two most suitable alternatives for Wordpress. Initially i opted for the first one only for the reason that i can preserve the current content without too much overhead. I found this a good alternative to Wordpress for it's minimal and accessible markup and for the fact it can rewrite the conventional wordpress URL's, meaning it makes the path names cleaner, but on the other hand i thought it would be more challenging but at the same time more satisfying and rewarding to create my own custom Javascript library for building the site. For this scope i used PHP only for calling some web services, pulling out the content from Wordpress database, wrapping as a JSON object, then transmitting over to the front end where with some ajax call i can build the whole page.

I wanted to build the site using cutting edge modern web technologies for this reason many of the features are not working as expected on older browsers. The whole site has been build up around HTML5, Canvas and CSS3 spiced with a lot of Javascript. This is somehow a mini MVC framework, the model part being responsible for obtaining the JSON data from backend, the controller having as main role to communicate with the view and model (triggering the model and passing the results to the view the latter organizing the received data in a visual manner).

Many of you may ask why i didn't make it with more fashinable MV* frameworks like Backbone, Angular.js or Ember.js? My answer is: when i started this project i wasn't very familiar with these technologies, i only heard about them, and once started i wanted to make it till the end. Maybe sometime i will think differently and will give it a try, but till then i'm pretty satisfied with the result. Of course there are some bugs which i have to address, like responsiveness, awkward page rendering when selecting a specific tag and associating the posts with these tags. Feel free to give any feedback be as good or bad.

As you probably realized sometimes you are redirected to my other domain name (esimov.com). I'm not completely decided either to keep esimov.com or esimov.com as my main blogging platform, the first one having a more 'business-ish' feeling, on the other hand the last one suiting more for a personal blogging scope. I will decide later.