Coder's Block v4 / Coder's Block

I am happy to announce that Coder’s Block v4 is finally live. Coded in .NET 4.0 MVC 3. It took me a ridiculous amount of time (4 months!) to make. I guess that’s what happens when you have a personal project with no deadline and an endless stream of tangents to go off on.

CBv4 is going to be a big source of blog fodder for the coming weeks. I learned a lot of new tricks and built a couple nifty things that I really want to share. But for now, I’ll just give some highlights.

Responsive Web Design

The entire site was built using mobile-first responsive web design. This means that every page is naturally mobile friendly. When more screen space is available, the pages will automatically adjust their layouts for a better viewing experience. Go ahead, open any of the pages in a desktop browser and then resize the window to be bigger or smaller. You’ll see what I’m talking about.

SuperFeed

One of my earliest ideas for CBv4 was to pull my activity from various sites around the net and show them in a single combined “super feed”. I built my own custom solution to do exactly that. It runs as a continuous server-side process, grabbing feeds and mixing them together. This is something I plan to release as open-source very soon.

Update: Super Feed on GitHub.

I decided to try my hand at making my own social icons. You can see one set I made in the super feed, and another set in the footer. I crafted them using Illustrator and Photoshop. Eventually, I want to add a few more icons for other popular sites and then release both sets for free.

Update: Mini Social Icons on Dribbble.

Image Fix

Some images on the site (like my Flickr photos in the super feed) needed to be dynamically scaled and cropped to fit into the layout. So I whipped up a little utility that could do this on the fly. Simple, but very useful. This is also something I plan to open-source.

Update: Image Fix on GitHub.