On a Beautiful 3-Day Weekend...

...I spent most of it working, and the rest of it sleeping and eating.

The weird part isn't that I started at 11am Saturday and worked till 3am Sunday morning. It also wasn't that I strangely ended up at Denny's with the same group of people until 5am. And it even wasn't how I passed out in the back seat of my car until 8:30am (thank you Chuck Norris).

No, the weird part was none of that. It was the fact that I ended up back at work around 2pm on Sunday and Monday. And I had a great time all 3 days. What a refreshing sense of accomplishment to (very nearly) finishing a long overdue project. It was also the first time ever that I've really worked with Minh on ... anything ... And I'm happy to say that I really do like working with the guy. He's sharp and I think he makes me more confident and egotistical about my software engineering rants.

I'd say the downsides to the weekend were not seeing Wendy enough, and not getting around to any of my homework :( That's all going to suck later.

On Site Revamp

I put off redesigning my site for a quite a long time. I think the main reason was I wasn't sure what I wanted to my main site be about. Think of it as an identity crisis for my webspace. Should it be a personal blog? Or perhaps a strictly professional portfolio? What should I do about my existing Blogger thingy? The list goes on.

So without too much of a plan in mind, I just started working. I started with my old homepage as a base and tweaked around. I switched to different layouts and thought about different techniques to keep the site maintainable and modularized. I feel very satisfied with what I have so far. In fact, I like it so much more than the current one that I've decided to replace my homepage before I've even completed it.

In the end, the redesigned yielded a very simple portfolio site. I stripped out the heavy-weight Rails homepage that I previously had because for the most part, I served static pages. Rails just became this overkill beast of a framework which kept my URL's pretty and my web server crawlin'. The switch to plain XHTML made such a huge difference in speed. On top of that, I don't feel like I've lost any functionality to the site because I can get pretty URLs by using Apache's URL rewriting engine, and I can achieve dynamic content through server-side generation and caching.

Many things still need to be done for the site, but I like the foundation I've set up for myself so far. RSS, pagination, and more ease of use and maintainability are high on my feature lists.