Category: web design

New blog design

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This blog is now 5 years old and needed a design revamp badly.

The old theme was based in a very simple one which was not designed for large screens. Also, back in 2007, cellphones were not like they are now and their use to browse the web was not comparable to nowadays’.

I wanted the new theme to be clean and responsive to different screen sizes, from my work screen (1920 pixel wide) to my cellphone’s.
I tried many themes and ended up modifying the Twenty Eleven one so I benefit from its great features but I also have a distinctive design.

So my blog passed from this:

To what you see now on your web browser.

I need to thank my friend Mario Sánchez and Helena, my wife, for their advice on sorting out some details in the design.

I also took the chance to create a software section where I put the most interesting projects where I have been involved. I had a similar section a couple of years ago but it was not maintained and I figured that Ohloh and other web pages would do this for me but the fact is that in the end I had a section about travelling in my website and none about the subject that the blog’s main subject (software).

Hope you like it.

Rancho 9.06 is out!

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I’m very happy to announce you that the new version of Rancho is out!

This version has many new things starting by its name/number. We decided to start using n Ubuntu-like versioning and so, instead of just incrementing numbers, we’ll use the year.month notation. So here you have the 9.06!

But what’s new in this new version!?

One of the main new features is the exportation and importation of you accounts using the Rancho Exportation File.
This file will contain all the information that you have on your Rancho system so you can use it for example on other systems or as a back up, etc.

Another really useful new feature is that now Rancho can import Basecamp exportation files! This means that you can export your account from Basecamp, import it on your Rancho installation and keep using what you had.

The design changed just a bit regarding the layout which is now fluid, adapting itself to your browser’s width.

For the admins, we introduced a logging system that let you easily see what’s being done in the whole system.
The search was also improved in terms of power and presentation. Search results are now divided in categories (Messages, Milestones, Wikiboars, etc.) to be easily filtered according to what users need.

To end, people in every project can now chat with each other with the new integrated real-time chat and a lot of bugs were fixed.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Rancho Chat                                 Rancho Basecamp Import

What are you waiting for? Get now Rancho 9.06 from www.getrancho.com!

Rancho’s back to life

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Howdy Rancho fans!

Like some (many?) of you noticed, we had been having problems in Rancho server since quite a long time.
The machine that was serving Rancho had some kind of trouble and was switching of all the time.

Finally this week my friend (and Rancho’s co-lead developer) Luís Rodrigues changed Rancho host and we’re set!

Hopefully, Rancho will be available 24/7 from now on.
Also, note that we changed some of the subdomains, so, you should check Rancho’s web site for the new URLs, mainly SVN’s and Trac’s.

Please let us know of eventual problems with the new page in our Google Group.

Big thanks to Luís Rodrigues for having fixed this problem!