Redesign and revamp
A couple weeks ago, I got an email from my lovely web host (webfaction) that they were migrating my account to a new shared server. I've had an account with them for so long that the server I was on was still 32 bit and they were moving me to a 64 bit server. Nice of them, but it meant I needed to do some legwork updating various software.

This blog is written in django, and the version was hilariously out of date. I had been running 1.2, and the latest version is 1.11 (!) The upgrade ended up being suprisingly easy. For the simple functionality of a blog, very little has changed in django over the last nine versions, which was convenient. Most of the original code required little re-working. The biggest hurdle was shaking the cobwebs loose around working on python again.

During the process of upgrading, I was looking at the site more than I had in a while. And what I was seeing was that it was ugly as sin. Web design ages poorly, especially design done by an inexperienced web developer, and this design was roughly eight years old.

So I added the goal of a redesign. I used Materialize, which I also used when building my pointing poker clone, and I quite like how things turned out. I especially like that materialize gives you a set of pre-defined color schemes to work with.

So that's the story of how my blog came back to life and why it looks different. I think my next goal is going to be rewriting it as a single page app in Elm, because I think Elm is a joy to write and it would be nice to build a full application with it.