Alessandro Melandri

About This Blog Theme

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I keep receiving requests about the theme used on my blog and a lot of people are asking me to release it as I did with DarkStripes.

I'm not going to publish the source code anytime soon, because I'd like to keep the look of my blog “unique”.

I promised to write a tutorial on how to customize the default Octopress theme to get a look similar to my blog, but I couldn't find enough spare time.
The new born baby and a relocation are draining my energies so, please, be patient and if you are in a hurry remember that Firebug and Chrome web inspector are your good friends.

Living Without Human Contact for 40 Years

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The incredible story of the meeting between a group of geologists and a family that lived for 40 years in the russian taiga without human contacts, even unaware of World Ward II.

The low door creaked, and the figure of a very old man emerged into the light of day, straight out of a fairy tale. Barefoot. Wearing a patched and repatched shirt made of sacking. He wore trousers of the same material, also in patches, and had an uncombed beard. His hair was disheveled. He looked frightened and was very attentive…. We had to say something, so I began: ‘Greetings, grandfather! We’ve come to visit!’

The old man did not reply immediately…. Finally, we heard a soft, uncertain voice: ‘Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.’

Smithsonian Magazine

Android Fragmentation

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Gingerbread, released on 2011, accounts for the 47% of the traffic mostly because a lot of Android smartphones are not upgradeable to the latest version.

This is a bit weird if you think that iOS 6 runs quite well on a 3GS, that was released on july 2009.

Source: Google

Going Minimal

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It's been a long time since I wrote something on my blog, mostly because I was busy at work and in my spare time I preferred staying with my family instead of “wasting time” on the internet.

In the meantime the Octopress template I released eight months ago has been adopted by a few people and besides being very happy for the feedback received I felt that I needed a more unique look for my blog.

One year ago I moved away from WordPress and choosed Octopress because I didn't want to deal with unnecessary complication anymore.

I built a template because I wanted a custom layout for my blog, but now that a new Octopress release is around the corner and I should check and update the template code to be compatible with the new features, I don’t have enough time to do it, I don’t want to do it, even if it’s simpler than I think.

So I built a new layout for my blog customizing only the CSS of the default template because this surely gives me less freedom over the layout but it's a lot more easy to maintain.
It's still a work progress, but I'm quite satisfied with it.

Here it is, minimal, and white.

It's a Customization

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Darkstripes Octopress theme is getting some good feedback and I'm receiving a lof of message from people thanking me for creating this theme.

Besides being very happy about the positive comments that the theme is receiving, I'd like to point out that Darkstripes is a customization of the original Octopress theme created by Brandon Mathis who surely put a lot of effort and time to build it so we all should thank him for giving us such a nice piece of software.

Thank you Brandon! :)

Some Darkstripes Theme Improvements

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Following the feedback I received after releasing Darkstripes, I've just released some little improvements to the theme.

Checkout the GitHub repository.

Blog archive

Decreased the font size and improved the vertical alignment of text elements.

Article footer

Added some styling to navigation buttons in the article footer improving the mobile user experience too.

As usual, you can test the latest changes right on this site.