January 7th, 2013
I’ve spent the last few weeks redesigning this website and rebuilding it on Statamic. My favorite feature of the new design is the slide-out panel that lists the entries by year. It was incredibly easy to achieve that functionality in Statamic with since and until parameters on entries tag. The code looked like this:
<div class="year">
<h2>2012</h2>
<ul>
{{ entries:listing folder="blog" since="January 1, 2012 00:00:01" until="December 31, 2012 23:59:59" }}
<li><a href="{{ url }}">{{ title }}</a></li>
{{ /entries:listing }}
</ul>
</div>
The only problem is that this code would be need to be manually replicated for every year I wanted to include. That seemed kind of silly so I asked my friend and Statamic team member Fred if he had a better idea of how to handle this. He was gracious enough to get me started on a plugin to do the job.
On GitHub
I added a few features and think this could prove useful for others that are jumping on the Statamic bandwagon. The plugin is called Entries by Year and I’ve documented it as thoroughly as I can on GitHub. So, please use it and help me improve it.
A couple of neat features
Alongside the expected folder parameter there are start_year and end_year parameters if you’re looking for more granular control of what the plugin outputs. By default, the plugin will grab the current year and go back through the year 2000.
If you want to be a little bit more articulate than just spitting out “2013” before this year’s posts, you can add a eby_header_text variable in your theme.yaml file like this:
eby_header_text: "Articles from"
to produce this for every year:
<h2>Articles from 2013</h2>
<ul>
...
</ul>
December 31st, 2012
A lot changed in 2012. Here are some notable highlights, roughly in order of how they happened:
Good Looks
In January, Amy, my partner in both domestic and business capacities, decided she was ready to start writing about style and fashion, subjects which she has developed quite a passion for. So, like good web workers, she designed and I built Good Looks Daily for her. In April, Amy got over her fear of having her photo taken and recruited me to be her photographer. I think we’ve amassed a nice body of work over the year. It’s been inspiring to watch Amy find her voice and grow a following of other fashion focused people around the world.
In May I helped release Good Looks for iPhone with Amy, who did a beautiful job of design, and Geoff Bradford, who did an outstanding job on the iOS development. I worked on the user experience and the feature set of the app, something I’d like to do more of in the future.
Goodbye Height & Hands, Hello The Outfit
After a little more than a year of Height & Hands, we formed The Outfit in June. The announcement had to wait until July because we were knee deep in setting up our business, getting settled in our new Boston office, and working on our first project for Evernote.
Being a partner at The Outfit has been the most exhilarating professional endeavor that I’ve ever participated in. There are not enough nice words to say about my partners Amy, Johannes, Marc, and Michael. With them, work is an absolute joy and the possibilities of what we can do as a company seem endless.
If the last six months are any indication, we have a bright future ahead. In fact, we already have some exciting news queued up for early 2013.
Health and Fitness
In August I started a weight loss competition with some friends. Since I was about to turn 30, the time was right for me to reassess my poor dietary habits and underwhelming workout routine. With the help of MyFitnessPal on iOS, I kept a log of my calories and tracked my weight.
Logging my calories was truly enlightening. Now I have a great sense of how much food is enough, what foods satisfy me, and what choices I need to make to maintain a more healthy weight. My biggest surprise was how few compromises I had to make.
I started out at a hefty 219 lbs and have since come down over 25 lbs to 193. Thanks to these changes, my energy level is up, I’m more focused and efficient when I sit down to work, and my baseline mood has improved.
Travel and a Big Birthday
In September I turned 30 and to celebrate, Amy and I went on a week long cruise of Northern Europe followed by another week in London. We ate a lot of good food, drank a lot of good beer, and reconnected with one of my good friends who lives there.
It was amazing, as always, to see other countries and broaden my world view. On this trip in particular, I gained a new found respect for mobile bandwidth thanks to an old iPhone 3GS and a pre-paid Vodafone sim card. I’ve since been highly aware of building mobile experiences that are efficient and fast.
For 2013
Personally, I still need to work on having a hobby. I’ve decided to pick up the guitar again after many years away. Professionally, I’ve already begun to hone my JavaScript skills and plan on taking them to the next level in the coming year. And once again, I’ll remind myself to be open to change and be objective in my decisions, seeing as that worked out pretty well last year.
December 28th, 2012
There have been some sizable changes to this website since you’ve seen it last, inside and out. On the inside, a new content management system and on the outside, a new design.
The Outside
As I set out to make the next version of this site, my focus was on a design that is easy on the eyes, easy to read on as many devices as possible, and as light on page weight as possible without sacrificing look and feel. What I came up with was a design that gets rid of everything but the most important elements of the reading experience.
With this sort of minimal design, typography and subtle touches of the user experience have a larger visual load to carry. With the magic of Typekit I’m using
Franklin Gothic URW Condensed for display text and FF Tisa Web Pro for body text.
I’ve already got some ideas on how I can improve the experience but I’d love to hear what you think.
The Inside
The most major change was moving the content management duties to Statamic even though last year I resolved not to mess around with different CMSs. To be fair, Statamic wasn’t around when I wrote that post.
The notable draw of Statamic is it’s lack of a database to make dynamic things happen. This has completely changed my development workflow. Now I have a copy of the whole site running locally on my computer where I can write, develop, or experiment with new features before debuting them. Then using BitBucket and Deploy, a Git push automatically deploys my changes onto a development server or live onto a production server. This workflow not only makes development easier but also a heck of a lot more fun to iterate and improve on.
Even though it’s still early days for Statamic, it’s an impressive piece of software with a bright future. It should be at the top of your list as you consider what to build your next website on. If you’re already on board, I’d encourage you to check out The Statamicist which is a great resource to supplement the official documentation.
