Introducing Syte, An open sourced personal site that has social integrations

This is very, very cool. One request: would you consider making the color thing not part of the license but just a "polite request"? I understand where you're coming from and have no problem complying, but it's a little confusing and unclear what the legal implications of the rule might be. For example, what if someone forks it and changes the design, getting rid of the border around the pic entirely? I think your rule is very reasonable, but would be better enforced through the honor system, not the law. (Or edit it to make it clear it's not part of the license.)

Also, I personally found it surprising that a second click on one of the social links (e.g. Github) opens the full page on Github. I expected it to be a toggle where the second click would make the Github tab disappear. Not sure if that's just me, but maybe a separate "pull out" or "full window" icon you can click would be more intuitive.

Spotted a bug on this. If you go back or forward in your browser to a blog post, it just shows a bunch of JSON code. You have to reload to get the site to properly show.

Very nice work. One suggestion: since it's obviously aimed at programmers, you should add programmer-oriented blog options besides Tumblr, especially the static blogs running from Github pages like Octopress, Jekyll, etc.

My prior blog was on Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter and all development work halted. It was truly a pain in the ass the get my blog posts and pictures out of it (they have an API, but no single API call get the entire blog in one tar/zip bundle, you have to script the whole thing).

Having experienced that I'll never use a 3rd party blog service again. I recently got everything back up and running in Octopress, and even if Tumblr or Blogspot embrace 'data liberation' and create an easy way to export your content, I don't care, it's just one thing I don't ever want to have to think about again.

Pretty sure I'm not the only programmer that feels that way, and who would otherwise love to use Syte but for its limitation to Tumblr.

The author's web site (http://rigoneri.com/) is cited as an example "Syte", but when I view that page on my iPad the right-hand side of the page is chopped off. Doesn't seem to be all that responsive (despite the author's claims).

The design has a problem on my eeepc, because I can only see half of the menu items on the left. I know that "position:fixed" is the "chic" thing to use currently, but still: don't. It almost always causes some problem.

Clicking on twitter en the menu just takes me to the twitter account. I guess I'm missing something?

Thank you. I've been thinking about putting up a personal site for a while but never got around to it. I tend to be one of those "consumers of content" rather than producers (especially when it comes to blogposts). Hopefully this will change but this looks totally in line with what I am looking for!

This looks really cool, the world needs more stuff like this.

One minor complaint is with the scrollable slide-outs. When you scroll down through a slide-out like the Instagram one, and reach the bottom, the page behind starts scrolling.

This is a common problem, and why I dislike using scrollable areas on web pages in the first place. There must be a good way to fix this. I just don't want the outside area to scroll when my context is inside the small scrollable area.

This is pretty cool, good work.

If you're a web developer+designer, it's probably not as useful, but for everyone else it rocks - and I hope to see people use/customize it to their liking. I love how it pulls so many services together. It seems like there's still some desire for some basic template for blogging after Dustin Curtis' last ordeal and now this, although it kind of seems like Twitter's Bootstrap has solved all of those basic problems for a lot of people.

JavaScript required to view the blog postings is a slight turn-off. What is the reasoning for it?

{"meta":{"status":200,"msg":"OK"},"response":{"blog":{"title":"rigoneri's blog","posts":11,"name":"rigoneri","url":"http:\/\/blog.rigoneri.com\/","updated":1339467147,"description":"","ask":false,"likes":0},"posts":[ ... ]}

How does Google take to this? As far as I can tell it has to evaluate the JS before it can crawl the site; I got a few seconds of "Loading..." after the page had finished loading while it was pulling in the JSON.

I love the concept.

Design-wise, I see a lot of things that remind me of svbtle (not trying to imply anything, just thought it was interesting)

I love the idea, design, and choice of frameworks/libraries, but I have one beef: I really, really dislike sites that prevent me from clicking with my middle mouse button. I open almost all links in new tabs using my middle mouse button and, currently, I can't do this on Syte.

Anyone remember Friendfeed?

Another site with responsive design and doesn't fix the sidebar with "position: fixed" in narrow viewports. Filed issue here: https://github.com/rigoneri/syte/issues/7

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I've been thinking about how to go about setting up my personal site, and this is a perfect combination of producing and consuming/aggregating from my other services. Definitely going to start playing around with this.

Woah thats a fantastic idea you have put together there. Well done sir!

This is ridiculously beautiful personal site them. My only complaint is that it requires a separate site for the posting of content.

If I was a talented dev, I think I would have potentially taken the Svbtle style wordpress backend and used wordpress as the blogging engine so the site and posts came from the same controlled source. A theme that integrates with Twitter, GitHub, Dribble as well as this one would do insanely well on Themeforest.

As mentioned by others, syte currently requires javascript to view blog posts.

For my projects, I have a little trouble deciding when it is ok to require javascript be enabled. What is the general consensus? Is progressive enhancement no longer a concern? How do you start new web projects, with javascript added after basic functionality is established or with it at the core?

I really like the looking of it. And good to know is written in Python (Python is my choice for server-side development, so I customize it).

I don't see the Contact and Fork Me on Github links on left when accessing from my Macbook. There should be a scrollbar.

Great idea and above all great execution.

One suggestion to improve the UX: rename "contact" to "email me", it's not obvious this tab will act differently than others and a lot of people don't use the email client installed on their computer.

Thanks for building it :) I loved the part about having responsive design baked in and it being on top of django (since that's one framework I know the best). Myself have been thinking of building something similar for a while.

Brilliant. This is one of those things I've always had in the back of my mind but never got around to doing. Especially love the responsive design. However the slide out twitter/GitHub etc. don't scroll on the iPad.

Wow, this is totally awesome! I'm going to give it a whirl tomorrow. I just switched from Django to Ruby on Rails and fell in love with the framework, so maybe I'll try porting Syte to Rails someday.

The idea reminds me of Sweetcron, from a few years back.

One more thing, when I am browsing your site on the iPad, the social integration is not working perfectly, e.g. Can't scroll your tweets..etc

I really wanted to hate this, but this is actually really well done. Great integration while making it feel native to the site. I love this.

This is pretty cool, I've been wanting to build something almost identical to this using node.js. Inspiration, this is!

Hell, yes. This is one of the kickass ideas I've ever seen in a while. Simple, matter of fact and very usable. Thanks!

Good work. I was thinking of something along the lines of Diaspora, but on a smaller scale. You kinda nailed it.

When I click a link that goes to another page and then click back, my scroll position isn't preserved.

Alright. I'll bite. I'll deploy it tomorrow and give it a whirl and see how it stands up :)

You know, this is one step towards creating the "next" facebook. Well done, keep it up.

Very nice, but consider smaller screens. There is no way to scroll the left sidebar

Very good job. And props for setting it loose! Love the git integration :)

What's different from posterous, Wordpress, tumblr, et al?

This is very cool

Horrible border around the image. And no mention of your inspiration? Come on man, you even use the same spelling type. We can't change the border? Seriously...that's ridiculous.