Changing gears . . .

This site was built originally for two purposes, both of which have been achieved:

I wished to popularize Inkscape as a tool and SVG as a format, and others have succeeded on this first front. Inkscape is a very full-featured graphics tool, but i have moved on to using watercolor on canvas and will continue to paint. SVG has been widely adopted and well used.

The site was left dormant as part of the second goal which was to test Search Engine Optimization techniques on an untouched and practically unused site filled with absolutely unique content. The test was successful, so now I wish to actually use the blog to point to newer work coming from the other side of my brain -- programming and software engineering.

On this front, I have begun to learn the ELM Language for front-end development. Recent work is on github.

I chose ELM for three reasons:

1. My back-end side projects all use functional programming languages and I wished to use that same approach on the front-end;
2. And, I wished to separate front-end work as cleanly and as completely as possible from the back-end and to minimize pain-points in front-end development like manipulating the DOM and adjusting CSS;
3. Finally, ELM is type-safe and compiles to Javascript, so the code works without runtime errors and is very portable.

More about how ELM helps me achieve each of these goals in future posts.