Also, I personally found it surprising that a second click on one of the social links (e.g. Github) opens the full page on Github. I expected it to be a toggle where the second click would make the Github tab disappear. Not sure if that's just me, but maybe a separate "pull out" or "full window" icon you can click would be more intuitive.
Could be changed to only preventDefault/stopPropagation if it doesn't match one of the specially tagged links, or by setting up a different selector for the specially handled links.
Mislav wrote a great post on how to do this robustly: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/2011/03/click-hijack/
Hope that helps!
But either way, I'll be keeping an eye on this!
$.ajaxSetup({ cache: false });
My prior blog was on Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter and all development work halted. It was truly a pain in the ass the get my blog posts and pictures out of it (they have an API, but no single API call get the entire blog in one tar/zip bundle, you have to script the whole thing).
Having experienced that I'll never use a 3rd party blog service again. I recently got everything back up and running in Octopress, and even if Tumblr or Blogspot embrace 'data liberation' and create an easy way to export your content, I don't care, it's just one thing I don't ever want to have to think about again.
Pretty sure I'm not the only programmer that feels that way, and who would otherwise love to use Syte but for its limitation to Tumblr.
One minor complaint is with the scrollable slide-outs. When you scroll down through a slide-out like the Instagram one, and reach the bottom, the page behind starts scrolling.
This is a common problem, and why I dislike using scrollable areas on web pages in the first place. There must be a good way to fix this. I just don't want the outside area to scroll when my context is inside the small scrollable area.
If you're a web developer+designer, it's probably not as useful, but for everyone else it rocks - and I hope to see people use/customize it to their liking. I love how it pulls so many services together. It seems like there's still some desire for some basic template for blogging after Dustin Curtis' last ordeal and now this, although it kind of seems like Twitter's Bootstrap has solved all of those basic problems for a lot of people.
How does Google take to this? As far as I can tell it has to evaluate the JS before it can crawl the site; I got a few seconds of "Loading..." after the page had finished loading while it was pulling in the JSON.
edit: when I click on an external link and then click the back button, I get the JSON too even with chrome. This is bad.
The best way to circumvent the issue is to prevent the browser from caching the request (ex. cache busting via random querystring parameters), or to use different URLs for the HTML and JSON response (ex. appending '.json' to the end of the path).
Design-wise, I see a lot of things that remind me of svbtle (not trying to imply anything, just thought it was interesting)
If I was a talented dev, I think I would have potentially taken the Svbtle style wordpress backend and used wordpress as the blogging engine so the site and posts came from the same controlled source. A theme that integrates with Twitter, GitHub, Dribble as well as this one would do insanely well on Themeforest.
For my projects, I have a little trouble deciding when it is ok to require javascript be enabled. What is the general consensus? Is progressive enhancement no longer a concern? How do you start new web projects, with javascript added after basic functionality is established or with it at the core?
One suggestion to improve the UX: rename "contact" to "email me", it's not obvious this tab will act differently than others and a lot of people don't use the email client installed on their computer.
