My blog gets a redesign every 18 months. There's no schedule, but that's about how long it takes for me to get bored with a design.
This year, the theme is simple. Simple to read, simple to write. BendyTree was starting to look like a clown car. To top it off, there was a lot of content that was hard to get to.
Blogging With Dropbox
I've always said,
Anyone who writes their own blog (instead of using WordPress) has too much time on their hands.
The other side of the argument is that WordPress lends itself toward clown car design & buried content. If I were better at PHP then it wouldn't be an issue, but I have no desire to enhance my PHP fu. WordPress also makes it EXTREMELY difficult for me to write code snippets & it always completely messes the formatting up when I edit a post.
So I spent Friday evening writing an extremely simple blog on top of Dropbox, email, & Markdown. Now I make a post by creating a .md file in textmate or by sending an email (w/attachments) to a secret email address.
404 Pages
Since I moved off wordpress, I lost all my permalinks & changed some of the titles. So if people find a post through Google, then the URL has changed and they get a 404 page. For example:
Old URL: bendytree.com/349/core-data-migrations-and-cave-monsters
New URL: bendytree.com/tips/Core-Data-and-Cave-MonstersThese URLs are very similar, so I'm using string comparison techniques like Levenshtein Distance to find the best matching page. If I find a good enough match, I send them straight to the page.
If there isn't a good match, I list all of the best options (example).
