As I’m finally getting around to playing with data visualisation a bit, I decided to try a real-life exercice: rendering data from the old Surfing Dirt forum, the one that was started over 10 years ago, before I gave it a new home.

I’ve been growing frustrated with Facebook for a while now, for many reasons. Some small, some more important. Let me expand on that a bit.

About a year and a half ago, I designed a logo for a project I intend to work on. It’ll be a tiny, activity-focused social site revolving around mountainboarding (as all I do is related to that). It’s still not 100% finalized, as I will probably change colors and some of the details of the shape. Anyway here it is:

So I volunteered to help my friend Kody start a company by making a website for this business he’s starting. As an experienced front-end developer, it’s not a huge task for me set up a small site. But to design it? That’s a challenge. I mean I have designed things before, but only for myself. So the pressure to come up with something good was different.

I run a bunch of websites off of my server, and I always kind of felt bad for not serving HTTPS. Some of the things I serve use passwords and even though none of the sites I host deal with politically-charged content, it still felt wrong to serve HTTP.