I have not blogged in over a year. Shame on me. I think part of the reason was because my blog template had become quite dated. I tweaked it a bit to make it semi-responsive a while back. But, I have never been happy with it.

So, I decided to build a new, mobile first template from scratch and use lots of modern (relative to my old template) CSS and responsive web design techniques. Things like rem for sizing things, flexbox, text-shadow, and background-size (for the header image). I know it is nothing ground-breaking. And, at the same time, it was nice to shed all the old compatibility layers and work with the code without worrying about fall backs.

For the font, I chose the super-popular Open Sans after reading "Serif or Sans Serif?" by Danielle Stone. I looked at many sans serif fonts. Open Sans just looked the cleanest to me.

I opted to go with an easy to read black text on white background after reading "How the Web Became Unreadable" by Kevin Marks. One great nugget in that article is where Kevin quotes Adam Schwartz:
A color is a color isn’t a color……not to computers…and not to the human eye.
I found this very interesting. I often look at my "black" SUV and think "my car looks kind of brown today".

With the help of the love of my life, Deedra, I found the header graphic, bought it from iStockPhoto and then played with the hue a bit to get it just right.

While testing, I found myself reading my old blog posts. It felt good. I really need to do this more.