If you're a regular reader of this blog and visited in the past few days, you likely noticed a dramatic difference in the blog's look and feel. The HTML for this blog has been generated by Blug, the static site generator I wrote, since about July. Previously, I was using Octopress and was generally happy with it.

So was every other technical blogger on the planet.

I didn't want to have a blog that looked identical to a hundred others. More importantly, I wanted more control over the metadata associated with the blog. Google introduced Authorship, content aggregators are becoming more sophisticated. I wanted my blog to keep up with the times. So Blug, and this blog by extension, is now chock-full of microdata from schema.org.

The designed changed as well. Octopress relied on tools and technologies that I didn't use in any other context, so I started from scratch with what I knew: Bootstrap, less, and simple Markdown. I'm no UI expert so everything is pretty spartan, but it get's the job done. If anyone designer out there is looking for some free publicity, feel free to re-theme the blog and I'll link to it from here.

Lastly, this is the first change in a much larger vision I have for Blug. If you check out the code from GitHub, you'll notice there's a web server in there with in memory caching of generated pages. Blug will eventually generate and serve blogs, with plugin services that are able to regenerate the static page in response to some external event. Stuff like adding links to other sites discussing your post in real-time, without any intervention. And gathering analytics locally rather than relying on third party services. But those changes are still in the works. Stay tuned.