Some time ago, GitHub retired the default cat icon and introduced Identicons. While we were working on the nub.is 404 page, Walid replaced the blocks in his GitHub identicon by Nubis blocks (from our cloud icon) and uploaded it to Gravatar. That (and the fact that we just got a new server by WebFaction, which I might blog about later) inspired me to make Nubis identicons.

On Saturday October 19th, Tim, Remco and I went to GDG DevFest NL.

You may have noticed that Nubis has launched a new shiny website recently, on a new shiny domain: nub.is In this post, I’ll list some of the technologies that we used to build the new site and some of the problems that we encountered.

Every web developer that has ever worked with PHP and MySQL (still the most common database solution out there) knows that it can be quite frustrating to set up your database schema. Most people start with a simple ER diagram that they then translate into SQL (and most web devs will use phpMyAdmin for this ‘chore’). When that’s done, you can really get cracking. Looking at your database schema, you can start to write your database interface logic. If you have a change in functionality you need to translate this to SQL and apply it to your schema.

In everyday conversation, there’s often a relevant-xkcd-moment. When the conversation has reached a state which has been described in a xkcd comic. In writing, these moments occur too. This is why Tim decided that we needed an easy way to embed xkcd comics in our blog posts.

I’m honored to bring you the first meta blog post. Since we’ll we sharing the source code of this blog with the world we thought it would be a nice idea to also write about said code here. Most features will be implemented as Jekyll plugins so you can easily submodule them in your own blogs. Today, I announce the first of those plugins.