One of the side effects of using a news aggregator over the more traditional brute-force approach of checking hundreds of sites every day is that you tend not to notice when someone stops posting. That’s how it was when Dunstan Orchard‘s posting slowed to a trickle earlier this year and then stopped completely in March. I didn’t really notice until he posted his last hello and goodbye today, saying that
I’m going to stop posting to this site. I just don’t find the time to write for it anymore, and it’s rude to keep making people check for updates which never appear.
Dang. On the plus side, this cloud has some sort of shiny lining that, on closer inspection, appears to be silver. He has packaged the entire contents of the site, from the database to the server-side code to the HTML and CSS and all of the images, into a zip file for wannabe-Dunstans to download and pore over in geeky adoration.
I think I said it before, and I may well continue to say it long into the future, but Dunstan’s blog is quite simply the best-designed blog, possibly the best-designed website, I’ve ever seen. No-one I’ve heard of can come close to his combination of visual design, interface design, client-side scripting, and server-side programming. Just look at the site for a few minutes. Aside from the stunning visuals, there’s the colour-coded linking of related comments; the live search box, which shows results as you type; the three selectable sidebars; and, to (literally) top it all off, the scrolling panorama with up-to-date weather, moon, and daylight conditions. Just wow.