Small Revolution, High Resolution

Since about a year now I was looking to make a couple of adjustments to this website. It’s now a thing done. As a result, the website has changed domain and changed its content management system, comments on the blog are now replaced with a follow-up system which is more flexible (for me), and at long last this website is ready for high resolution.

The Domain

Why change? This is a small protest gesture towards the US government who think it can seize “.com” domains for a website operating in another country just because they violate some US law. Not being a US citizen, I’d rather avoid abide by two jurisdictions if I don’t need to. And so it’s done.

By making my domain a “.ca”, and by using the services of a Canadian hosting company and registrar with a Canadian root domain, everything stays in Canadian jurisdiction. Not that I expected problems would come for my “.com” (which still lives on as a redirect), but why take more risks?

The CMS

This website is now baked by Piecrust. Everything is made out of static pages « compiled » locally on my computer and synchronized to the web server. This allows me for one thing to put the whole website under version control using git, and to create branches, try things, etc. Static pages are also the most stable way you can build a website, and what works best under load. I’m quite satisfied with the result.

It’s also much simpler to maintain backups when no database is involved and when everything is already a direct copy of things on my computer.

Bye Comments!

Comments have been replaced by follow-ups. In short, if you have something interesting to add, write to me and I’ll add it as a follow-up. Or write something on your blog and I’ll add a link. In fact, you might not even need to notify me: if I find something related to one of my blog entry I’ll add it myself. A follow-up sits somewhat in between an update at the end of the post and a comment. I like the concept, so let’s see if it flies.

You can already see what it looks like by going to some of my older posts such as this one.

Note that all the previous comments are still there. It’s only the comment form which has disappeared. Send me an email and I’ll add a follow-up instead.

High Resolution

This update gets rid of almost all images and replaces them with CSS rules for gradients, shadows, and rounded corners (images are still there for browsers that do not support all this in CSS). Remaining images are all in double resolution (twice the pixel in width and in height) or as vectors (using SVG). Given that the number of images is limited on my website, it shouldn’t have too much impact on either bandwidth or speed.

Even though it seems of fashion now to justify this kind of change because of the new « Retina » Macbook Pro or the latest iPad, those changes will benefit many more people who don’t have the latest devices: every people out there using the zoom function of their browser will see a much better picture now. In fact, I’m a little surprised that the ubiquity of this zoom function in browsers did not push web designers to address high resolution issues sooner.

But at least the idea of making websites that work well in high resolution seem to be getting on track now. Better later than never.