ChrisStreeter
SF Cable Car Route Llamas, Alpacas and Mutants Fall Colors Mardi Himal Trail Golden Gate Zabriskie Point Prayer Flags Sunset Chinchero at Sunset Annapurna South in the Early Morning Fish Market Cementerio de Trenes de Uyuni Night Cats Sunset From Moro Rock Very rare deserted street Half Dome at Sunset Machhapuchhre Sunset from Marshall Beach, SF Grafitti The Danube at Night Annapurna South Under the Stars Mardi Himal Trail Rolling Fog Prepping to FIght Boudhanath Stupa Sheepherders and Annapurna South Cumhuriyet Anıtı Phewa Boats Alamo Square Bluebird Skies Stars Over Annapurna South White Mountains Sunset Fog Rolling In Half Dome at Sunset Vocano Scarred Mountains The Golden Gate at Night Old Man in Siding Twilight Fog Market Flags Bodie Eastern Sierras Under Shadow Snow and Shadows Temple Statue Marin Headlands Sand Dunes Hong Kong from the Peak Bay Area Sunrise Yosemite Fall Leaves Monument Valley Green River Canyons at Sunrise The Blue Mosque Buildings and a Bridge Cropped Crosswalk Headfirst Pisac Hillside The Buttermilks Rooster Fights at Forest Camp Resting Zabriskie Point Photographers Annapurna South

Refreshed Design

December 04, 2012 —

I recently decided to switch to a static site framework instead of my old Wordpress-based homepage. Since Python is so awesome, I naturally chose Pelican as my static site generator of choice because it is written in Python. I also wanted something that would be easy to host elsewhere for free, like on Heroku. I'm tired of managing a personal server.

A few scripts later, and I had a site that looked just about the same as before, but was fully static. However, I decided to also take the opportunity to refresh the design, and bring it forward. I wanted to keep the dynamic header that's been part of my site for so long, but I didn't want to create custom rectangular photos like I did before. In addition, if I did the rectangular style photos, they wouldn't fit all the way across the width of the page, leaving whitespace on either side of them.

So I took a design cue from Kickstarter and created a grid of images that are automatically pulled from a Flickr tag on my account at compile time. I also added some other custom plugins to look for special Flickr markdown tags in my posts to automatically insert images. The result is a site that should load faster, be smaller, and should also be easier keep updated and experiment with. I still need to rewrite my travel page to fully port my previous homepage over, but that'll be work for another day as that code is really old, and really messy.