The Redesign Continues

Today I decided to do a little bit more to make this site look just a touch nicer. Rather than relying on doing everything myself, I decided to pull in bootstrap which the people at Twitter have been nice enough to provide. It allowed me to strip out some of my own css, add the little older and newer buttons down at the bottom of the main page, and provides a whole lot of functionality that I haven't used yet... fancy drop down menus, a menu bar, pop-up alerts, progress bars, and more.

I did find getting started a little difficult, which based on some googling, seems to be common. Bootstrap provides a lot of tools to make your website look nicer, but it just puts them out there and doesn't really make it clear how to use them. This is made more confusing by all kinds of talk of downloading the source, compiling with less, and so on. As a programmer, I'm sure I'll find an excuse to dig into less some day, but for now I just want to make my site look a little less like your stereotypical programmer's website. So the way I got started was to just download the compiled css, drop it in, and see what about my site looked different. I also found the components page incredibly useful. That page shows each of the components, such as the nav buttons at the bottom, with a basic usage example and the configuration options.