Art-directed blogging

For the past year or so I've been wanting to rework my blog, inspired by sites like Jason Santa Maria's fantastic art-directed blog and Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico's A Brief Message. A couple of weekends ago, I finally got inspired to do something about it.

Unfortunately for me, no existing blogging platform is suited to the kind of blog where every post can have its own design. A few months ago I did find a plugin for Habari that allowed me to include custom CSS in a post, but to do it properly you need more control than that. So I re-invented the wheel and wrote my own small blogging CMS.

This post isn't so much about that (although doing it re-affirmed my  love of Ruby on Rails as a fantastic framework for very quickly building web apps), as it is a quick intro to my plans for this site.

The plan

Although I have no intention of turning the site into an online magazine (for a start I write here far too irregularly), the idea was to have 'cover stories' like a magazine: articles that get the special front page treatment with big images and all. Once you click through to the article inside, it too might have more attention paid to its design and layout than other regular articles.

A start

I've launched with three ready-made covers: two photographs and one article. The article is one I wrote recently based on some work we did with progressively-enhanced Google Maps at Gumtree. Its cover actually makes use of the technique described within to load a live Google Map as its background. These cover articles don't have to  be too static!

The two photo covers are a couple of photographs I've taken in the past year that I really like and that I thought suited the cover treatment: one of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park and the other closer to home of the Design Museum in London at night.

Please let me know what you think of the site and try to forgive anything that breaks: it's all still very new!