First of all, don’t panic. Despite the fancy new design, this is still the angry, sweary Snipe.Net that you’ve come to know and love and occasionally stumble across in a Google search for “muppet bukkake”.
Speaking of muppet bukkake, you’re welcome for that video.
Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the site lately. What it’s been, what I think I want it to be, what I want to get out of it, and what I want you to get out of it. It definitely needed a facelift – the previous design was from 2009 and was getting a little worn around the edges.
The casual observer might think that I don’t write much anymore, based my posting frequency of the past few years – and that’s part of what’s chapping my ass. I create a shit-ton of content all over the place. Twitter, certainly, but also on other websites I run.
The old Snipe.Net categories didn’t really accurately reflect what I’m most interested in these days, and as a result, I had categories in the main nav that hadn’t had a new post in literally years.
This whole thing started because Disqus broke my comment layout. Seriously. They broke my custom CSS so my comments were hard to read. I was picking at the HTML to try to make it suck less, and something snapped. Suddenly everything that had been bothering me about this blog over the past 3 years was HOLY CRAP THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD and it all came to a head.
What I decided I wanted out of a redesign:
[starlist]- Clean, responsive design
- Rethink content on a high level
- Consolidate as much of my content from separate sites/blogs to better reflect the things I think are important
- Revisit advertising/earn opportunities
Last time I revamped the site, I was in a different place in my life and my career. I don’t actually get to write much code anymore, and when I do, it’s usually for my open source projects. I somehow managed to transition into a much more sysops/devops-heavy role over the past few years at my job, which means I’m not writing about programming that much.
What you can look forward to:
[starlist]- More content, more often
- More reviews of stuff I really like
- More devops and security stuff
- Probably more category shuffling
- Occasional confusingly non-sweary posts
- Plenty of highly-sweary posts
- Aggregation of the most awesome stuff I post to social media so it doesn’t get lost in the vast sea of dick jokes that is my Twitter feed
You may see more affiliate links around the reviews I post. (Maybe – it’s always a pain in the ass to generate those links, and I’m usually too lazy or too busy.) Rest assured that as always, my opinions and good graces cannot be paid for. If I’m saying something nice about a thing, it’s because I like the thing and use the thing and want everyone I know to use it because it’s awesome.
I’m still trying to sort out how I want to do the aggregation. It has to be painless for me, but also kind to those of you who are subscribed to my RSS feed, so you’re not slammed with all kinds of aggregate-generated content. I’ll also be pulling over older (but still valid) content from a few other sites so that all of this awesome can congeal into a delicious content-[tooltip text=”santorum” gravity=”nw”]Look it up – I’m not going to explain it to you[/tooltip].
I’m also experimenting with Flattr, as you can see by the shiny green button at the bottom of posts. I’d heard of it before, but finally got off my ass to try it after watching TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard. We’ll see how it goes. Flattr me if you dig it.
I’ve started to pull over content from TehAwesome.Net and FBMHell and am working on figuring out how to reorganize everything, but I’m really excited to once again have one place for all of my passions to live.
I ended up splitting that content out across multiple super-focused sites, but it meant I was spread thin and there was no one place to get all of the stuff I was working on.
As you get to read more from me in the new Security & Privacy and Devops sections, you’ll realize that I like things simple. I like fewer moving parts, I hate magic in my technology, and I like to keep my attack surfaces and total number of things that can break very small. Running one site is simpler than running 5. Updating one site and only having to worry about plugin conflicts in one site is easier than 5. Fewer moving parts, fewer points of failure.
I think for a while, I was worried that because I have such a wide range of sometimes unrelated interests, if I talked about everything I was interested in, people would get lots of stuff in their RSS feeds that they didn’t care about, mixed in with only 1-2 things they did. I actually still don’t have a solution for that, but the one thing I can promise you is that I’ll do my best to make this a site I’d want to read. Hopefully you’ll let me know how I’m doing along the way.
I don’t have all the answers yet, but I’m pretty pumped to start down this road and I feel like I’m off to a good start. I have so much to share with you. Take some time, poke around a little. Tell me what you think, either here or on the Twitters.
