Thursday, May 31

I made an internet thing

To coincide with my switch from FTP to Blogger’s domain hosting, I’ve changed up this blog’s template (now a simple variant on Darren’s Denim) and unveiled a new homepage at http://www.grogmaster.com/.

This new design is more groggish — and therefore more representative — than the last one, which is something I’ve been wanting for a while now.

The “internet things i found” section is a compilation of my shared items, from del.icio.us, Google Reader, and Facebook. I made a pipe with Yahoo! Pipes to combine and normalize the three feeds, which I then pull in via JSON. It ends up getting the job done, though the implementation is a bit sketch. Still, it’s better than having to handle the fetching and parsing on my own server.

I also pull in the last three posts from this very blog via Blogger’s GData JSON support. MochiKit is used to make HTML generation sane, and to parse the date format that GData outputs.

I based the overall structure on the Holy Grail CSS layout, which does three columns (though I’m not using the left-most) in an ideal source order. I still have to stick some stuff in the footer, perhaps a copyleft/right-type statement.

Still to come are better links to and integration with the other websites I’ve scattered by online identity to. I’d really like to work in a Last.fm chart, but it’s a real pain to get the look and size right.

Oh, and as a last bit, this new design actually works in IE6, since I can test on my own machine with Parallels.

If you can read this…

…then the DNS changes went through. Thanks to the new “Missing Files Host” feature, I can move from FTP to domain hosting without any (significant) problem!