I started quietly working on an update to this blog last week and I hope you like the changes. If you are reading this in your feed reader, take a moment to go check it out on the site at http://eraserandcrowbar.com.

Still in Beta

I am not 100% done with the changes that I wanted to make, but the bulk of the plumbing is done. I really felt that it was a good time to put out the updates and ask for feedback on what I had done so far. I expect to make minor tweaks and I have no issues doing that in public.

Does it look familiar?

You might have stumbled on a project called “the setup” that is interviews with a bunch of technologist about the equipment that they use to get the job done. My new site template was inspired by that site (and a bit of the CSS is taken directly from the site). The creator of that site shared it under a creative commons license and the attribution is on every page of my template. Lots of love for sharing your work!

Special thanks goes to Matt Gauger who turned me on to the setup and has created his own version of the setup that profiles Wisconsin technologist. Matt, my answers are done, I just can’t find a picture that I like!

Other changes

In addition to the obvious visual changes I made a number of “behind the scenes” improvements, including:

  • Fixed links that were pointing to http://larryclarkin.com so that they 301 redirect to http://eraserandcrowbar.com. So pretty much any link on the internet will now find the original post.
  • Fixed internal links to point to a common location and do so in a relative fashion. This will make back-up and changing hosting providers much easier (not moving, but you never know!)
  • Dropping tables from most of the site; there are still a couple in the formatting of the comments section from the dasBlog software, and I am debating about what to do with those.
  • Cleaned up a number of validation errors that were caused by a combination of the blogging software, original template and my terrible markup skills.

I will be following up with a couple of blog posts on some of the things that I discovered while making the updates to this site, because I think you might find them useful. Just for reference here is a screen shot of the previous look and feel:

Screen Shot of Blog