Croftie Does The Django
So May 1st is Reboot Day and I’m sure there are going to be plenty of great redesigns around the web, but without even seeing them all yet, Croftie’s New Hotness gets my 1st place vote and my supreme jealousy as well. In fact, the redesign is so good that I’ve vowed never to make fun of Jeff’s penchant for pink again.
Normally a blog redesign is not something I’d write an entire post on, but the new jeffcroft.com is pretty special. I don’t mean special only in the visual sense, but rather in the paradigm-breaking sense.
Has anyone ever really seen a “live search” that impressed them? Live search, until now, has just been about saving you the trouble of hitting the enter key. But Croftie’s live search is a jaw dropper. Start typing in a term like “SXSW” and down slides a panel which shows you not only blog entries which contain that term, but comments, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flickr photos as well… all separated nicely into columns. I fully expect to start seeing more of this around the web once more people get wind of it.
Another interesting aspect of the new jeffcroft.com is that it’s written entirely in Django. This really intrigues me, given that there seems to be a growing groundswell of discriminating bloggers looking for a way to break out of the MT/Wordpress/TextPattern mold in as dramatic a fashion possible. MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django have been getting a lot of love lately and I’m wondering if CroftieCMS might just be the catalyst for this sort of thing to really take off. I’ve yet to even dip a single toe into the MVC waters, but developments like these are hard to ignore. Of course, no sooner do I profess my curiosity in Django that The Wolf tells me he has something cooking as well… and it has nothing to do with either Django or Rails. More details as they become available.
Technology and design aside though, the single most impressive aspect of Croftie’s new site to me is how comprehensive of an expression platform it is. It’s not just about blog entries with all sorts of miscellany decorating the sidebars. It’s about all parts of Jeff’s life. It’s about essays. It’s about link collections. It’s about photos of Jeff with strange women. Just about the only thing that’s not on there yet is his portfolio, and considering how impressive the site itself is, he really doesn’t even need one.
Any other noteworthy redesigns around the web today? Feel free to plug them in the comments…
Mike, I’m totally flattered. I have no idea why you wasted your time writing this, but I thank you immensely.
Only one complaint: of all the beautiful girls in my photostream that you could have chosen to link to (you know, like my girlfriend), why oh why did you have to choose that one? :)
(Editor’s Note: I was actually looking for a very embarassing one I remember seeing several days ago. Lucky for you, I found the Tammy Fae one instead.)
Jeff’s redesign is the most amazing personal site design I have seen in some time. As someone who has spent nearly two years now trying to come up with a design for his personal site, stuff like this inspires. At the same time, it also reveals how much work I need to do to produce something anywhere near as good as this. Bravo!
I’m so not prepared for this. I only had time to change my downtown plans for tomorrow.
How far out of the loop am I that I hadn’t heard about reboot – nor the naked day?
Damn. Time is short.
Mike, have you seen Bryan’s reboot yet?
Miko: Yep… and I’m starting to notice a common theme already in many of the reboots — light text on dark backgrounds. Interesting for sure, but I have to admit that readability is much tougher to achieve with such a palette.
It is the “new” use of diverse technologies that makes this reboot a standout before I’ve seen any of the other ones. Very inspiring although without any programming experience worth mentioning, it’ll be a very hard for many others to break out of the template mould like jeff did.
No matter what, it’s a fantastic site!
I personally love JustKyle the color scheme is amazing. The same goes for MattBretts redesign. I “realigned” (horrible word, I know) my portfolio, but I’m not happy with it.
I also love Kyle’s color scheme. That’s a beautiful looking redesign, no doubt.
Agree. Jeff’s definitely gone over the top with this one, and it suits him fine.
I’m with Chad on this one. Didn’t hear about the CSSReboot. I did hear about CSS naked day, but I forget when that was supposed to be.
Anyway, great work Jeff, I had never seen your site before but I think I’ll be following along now. If Mike likes it, it must be good.
Wow, I really like Jeff’s new site. It’s has a subtraction.com-esque vibe, but with a lot more life built into it.
The other rebooters I’ve seen so far have been damn impressive as well. Bryan Veloso’s new site is the hotness, although it’s a bit hard to navigate. You can tell these guys put a ton of work into this stuff, especially since Croft wrote his own CMS.
Heheh, great update to my illustration — it suits Jeff perfectly.
I had lots of crazy ideas for what I wanted to do but Jeff is a task-master with a vision that I could not deviate from. If we had been in the same room, I’m pretty sure he would have physically smacked me to get things the way he wanted them.
(Actually; we only went through 2 updates and he okayed my second version with great enthusiasm. I’m happy to see it making it’s way around — and particularly happy to see it featured on mikeindustries.)
His search thingy is fantastic!
This is the best redesign since Mr. Bowman redesigned Stopdesign.
I am loving the live search capability and the premise of it… but one has to ask, how useful is it ?
Initital tests – not really very useful at all.
Jeff, I am not trying to rain on your parade here – I think you have done an outstanding job with your redesign. And I also love the layout of the search results.
Minus a couple of niggles.
* No printback of what the term searched was
I typed in the word “saturn” for something that i would be sure not to bring back any results. To my amazement, it brough back 3 blogs with some hundreds of other posts . Same with bookmarks.
This cant be right… Was it really seaching for saturn…?
* Not searching for the right word
I typed in saturn as fast as i could. I can touch type at a fair clip. I was amazed that saturn returned so many results, so i added an s to the end. “saturns” returned no results. Fair enough so i took the s off and waited for the previous results.
Turns out saturn returned no results either…So what is the live preview actually showing the first time round?
I am not trying to crucify you, especially if this is just a reboot glitch. But it seems that all this fuss over something that doesnt provide any real value is a tad misplaced?
Marc b…
Thanks for the bug report. If you read my post on the matter, you know that I am not a javascript maven and fully expect there to be bugs. Sounds like you’ve found one (although i can’t seem to duplicate it). I’ll look into it.
And you’re right — there isn’t a printback of the search term when there are results found. This is definitely a design oversight, and I’ll fix it.
Hi again jeff,
I just re-read my post and realised how negative it was.
Looks like someone had “a case of the mondays” 2 days late (In NZ it’s wednesday)
I really wasn’t trying to bag the search. It was more a case that the rest of the site paid such attention to detail that the broken search stood out like a sore thumb in comparison.
I am looking at downloading a screen capture program so i can produce a small movie for you to see how i am getting this result.
Actually, this is the first I’ve ever heard of any live search at all, so I’m pretty excited about it.
Looks like more ppl are taking croftie’s live search idea and expanding on it – http://www.stocktemple.com seems to have done a pretty decent job.