greghochsprung.com

I hope it has become apparent through my writing that I really want to become a part of the startup ecosystem as soon as I can. Even though this is a great time to be looking for a job with a startup, there are two big hurdles for me to achieve this goal. First, I am not confident enough in my programming abilities to feel like I would make a meaningful contribution in a small startup. And second, it is hard to meet other like-minded geeks where I currently live (Tampa, FL). I don’t see us moving anytime soon (without a job waiting for me at the other end of the journey!), but I am trying hard to improve my coding skills in the meantime to overcome my first hurdle.

I am a huge fan of Apple products and own an iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro (and want a new iMac and MacBook Air!). I absolutely love my iPhone and see it as a very promising platform for the foreseeable future. Apple has a large, growing, happy userbase (that is willing to pay for apps if I decide to go it alone and sell my own apps). So, since I love my iPhone and am confident in the future of the iOS platform, I am going to focus my coding on just that. I spent some time during college in a mobile app development class where I learned some iPhone development, but mostly learned Android development. So I am basically starting from scratch.

I recently purchased two books: Craig Hockenberry’s iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual and Joe Conway & Aaron Hillegass’ iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide. I have tried going through both of them, but it is really hard for me to stay focused reading so much about development before actually getting to get my hands on the code. I’ve also tried the Stanford iPhone programming courses available via iTunesU, but run into the same problem - I tend to lose interest. Does anyone have any suggestions for other, more hands-on ways to learn iOS development that are still comprehensive? (I fear that going through simple tutorials I find online would not be comprehensive enough.) Anyways, hopefully this will (finally) mark the beginning of a successful month or two of learning iOS development for me.

As I was working on my (very) simple blogging engine (more on that soon), I started thinking a lot about the template I would use. I really liked my most recent Tumblr theme, with all of the great widgets in the sidebar, but noticed that a lot of my favorite blogs don’t have any widgets. They have a sidebar with several links (archive, colophon, contact, projects, RSS, etc.) and an image at the top. That’s it.

It seems like minimal themes have become very popular for blogs. I’ve even watched several blogs switch from a more cluttered, widget-ful layout to a simple and elegant layout. I really like the look and feel these sites provide with their very minimal interfaces. A good header and a good font puts all the focus on the writing and creates an enjoyable reading experience. This is the exact experience I want my site to provide. And so, I’ve decided to revamp my theme here on Tumblr. With this post, my new theme is going live!

I tried to make my new theme as simple as possible. I took my old theme and completely removed the sidebar. I added a few links to the top of the page and added a search box to the bottom of the page. I also made my content div wider than it used to be and centered it on the page. I am keeping Helvetica as the font for now, but have been browsing TypeKit and Google Fonts for a different one. I even got rid of the footers that were after every post on the homepage. Those only show up if you visit the permalink now.

And with my new theme comes a goal: I plan to post at least one long-ish post per week going forward. If I don’t meet that goal and you happen to notice, drop me a line telling me to write something!

(I said I’d have more to say about my blogging engine, so here it comes… I am going to put that project on hold briefly. I have a (basically) functioning version that works on my local machine, but I don’t feel like I have a good enough reason to pay for hosting when Tumblr is working just fine for me. In the future, I’ll probably need a hosted server and can use my own blogging engine then, but for now I’m sticking with Tumblr.)