Weblogs
-
Over the holiday break I decided to create a new home for Through the Interface, one based on self-hosted WordPress. While I've invested many hours in my use of Typepad, over the years – some fruitfully, others less so – I really felt it was time for a change. This decision isn't without its challenges: I had nearly 1,400 posts to transfer, plus external links that need to be re-directed (which can only really be done by keeping the Typepad site alive… they don't allow people to create their own 301 redirects, which means I'll have to do use some…
-
Now that the dust has finally settled on Autodesk University 2015, I thought I'd write a couple of posts about some fun I had on Wednesday and Thursday. At this year's event I had classes to deliver on both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings (at 8am and 10am, respectively). This is probably due to the fact I'd requested 90-minute timeslots and they quite sensibly schedule the longer sessions before noon and shorter sessions after it. Which all makes perfect sense. But it also meant that I didn't "let my hair down" properly until Wednesday night, by which point I'd finished my…
-
It's insane how the years tick past. Today marks the 9th anniversary of Through the Interface. For a bit of fun, I've added an Easter Egg (well, actually it's more like a Birthday Cake) to Vrok.it: Choose the "Cake" button on the left to view a Birthday Cake modelled completely using AutoCAD. If you connect to the session using the QR code, you can see the birthday cake in stereoscopic 3D on your smartphone using Google Cardboard. Or without it, if you're good at squinting. In case you're interested, the mechanics of creating the 3D text in AutoCAD were quite fun:…
-
As promised (threatened?) back in February, this blog has finally received a much-needed design refresh. I had hoped to get our internal creative team to help with this, but that unfortunately didn't pan out: all issues that you come across are therefore the responsibility of yours truly. Here are the key changes in this refresh: Based on Typepad's "Snap" responsive design template Switched to new fonts: Lato for titles and headings, Open Sans for body text Displays excerpts rather than full posts on the home page and post indices/archives The intention is that the blog be much more readable on…
-
It's been several years since this blog received a redesign. I've tweaked the format from time to time, adding social buttons and various other widgets, but it's starting to show its age, especially as more and more people are browsing from devices with smaller form factors. And this blog does look pretty bad on mobile devices… The good news is that Typepad does have a number of responsive design templates which apparently look good on a variety of devices with a variety of form factors/resolutions. I've submitted a request to our creative team for an updated design, asking that whatever…
-
I've been chewing on this for some time, now, but I've decided it's time to act. Well, as soon as AU is over I'll act, anyway. Which I expect means it'll morph into a New Year's resolution for 2015. 🙂 Back when this blog was launched, the Git project was still relatively young. But it's clearly become the version control technology to use, especially when putting code out there in the open. And this blog is all about putting stuff out there in the open, after all. Autodesk is using GitHub for our PaaS samples – which for now includes…
-
I woke up this morning thinking "it's about that time of year". Sure enough, it was eight years ago today that I made the first post to this blog. [This reminds me that the blog really could use a face-lift, if only for my photograph: I keep meaning to get a new profile snap taken, as I now have significantly more facial hair… nothing too crazy, just a small part of my ongoing southerly follicular migration ;-). And as I'm bound to look older – especially as I'll forgo the Photoshopping my photographer friend insisted on, last time around –…
-
This one's mainly for my fellow bloggers – especially those using the Typepad blogging platform – to help address a problem related to editing old blog posts using Windows Live Writer, a tool I can honestly say I can no longer blog without. Incidentally I'm now working with Live Writer 2012. With that said, it may also be of interest for people who want to programmatically query their favourite blogs and create offline indices into their posts. Maybe. 🙂 I use Live Writer primarily to author blog posts – which it allows me to do offline, something I find incredibly…
-
Some of you may have noticed a few changes that have been made to this blog over the last week or so. Firstly, I finally got around to implementing per-page sharing – for now via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn – for individual blog posts. This took me longer than I'd have liked because I use Typepad Advanced Templates (which means I do a lot of hand-hacking of HTML to implement new features, giving more flexibility but requiring more work to do anything significant). If there are other social networks you'd like to share to – Pinterest, anyone? – then…
-
This is the 1,000th post to "Through the Interface" – a milestone I mentioned was coming up a few weeks ago. Which means I'm hitting about 142 posts per year, which is pretty much on target (I aim for 3 posts a week, so that's about right). Something that occurred to me, over the weekend, is that it's often not very easy to discover content contained in the blog: there's search (which usually seems to work well, but even I have trouble finding posts I'm sure I've written, from time to time) and the post indices ("Post Index" and "Reverse…