It’s not often that a break in career coincides with a holiday lull, but my departure from Core77 in mid-December constitutes just that: a three week break, though recent conversations indicate this is soon ending. I’d been planning on migrating my blog over to a more flexible platform for some time now, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.
So: Presenting carlalviani.com v2. It’s on WordPress now, which is an obvious improvement over Blogger from my end, and coupled with proper hosting, enables far more flexibility than its earlier incarnation. Most immediately noticeable is the ability to install custom themes; the one you’re looking at now is Basic Maths, and I’m deeply infatuated with it.
One of the best parts about organizing the Creative Confab series for Coroflot last year was interviewing the panelists. Khoi Vinh, design director for NYTimes.com was perhaps the most enlightening, and I’ve followed his blog ever since. Among his numerous claims to fame is an instrumental role in the rigorous application of grid systems to web design over the past decade. When I heard he was creating a WordPress theme last November, I knew I’d found a solid reason to finally migrate my blog.
Learning Wordpress from scratch and installing the theme took the spare hours of a holiday week, and I’ve spent a bit of each day since then taking advantage of its flexibility to divide the content into something more sensible. This means my design projects now occupy their own Portfolio section, links to favorite writing samples get their own Writing page, and the brief story of how I got to my current state of professional affairs now dwells independently on the About page. Added content and organization is in the works, but in the meantime I’m looking forward to a blog that’s actually a blog. Twitter’s fun and all, but sometimes I’d rather write on a topic that doesn’t get full service from 140 character bursts.