The Author

I'm Michael Monteleone, a passionate software developer and graphic designer from the New Orleans area. I believe good software should be invisible at best, magic and delightful to use at worst, and that simplicity is worth the extra effort to achieve. Simplicity is the whole point.

While I have written software for multiple Fortune 500 companies and have had work featured in the Wall Street Journal, I don't expect you to be impressed by that. I certainly wouldn't be.

Since graduating from LSU, I have lived in Baton Rouge, but I still refuse to call it home. In a past life, I was a painter and musician and hope to revisit both of these soon.

Mac. TextMate (but I'm giving Vim the fair chance it deserves). Visual Studio by day.

The Site

The site is designed by yours truly and powered by Jekyll, the Real Man's blogging platform which allows for it to simply be a build-able, versioned, software project on GitHub. It's 2010. You don't need a relational database management system for some mostly-static HTML. Stop it.

The design represents a compromise between a desire for single-column naked, focused, simplicity and the fun and frolic of animation, color, and widgets in the Time Machine-inspired main banner navigation.

Its layout is bound to a strict nine-column grid. Press CTRL+SHIFT+L and see for yourself. Seriously, try it. The effect is particularly noticeable on the Projects page.

I am employing a possibly overly-broad font palette of Helvetica titles, Times bodies, Bebas logo and main navigation links and Droid Sans Mono for code blocks, the latter two of which are @font-face-enabled.

The site proudly uses HTML5, including semantic markup, microdata, CSS3 font-faces, and CSS3 transitions.

The CSS3 transitions are one of several custom jQuery plugins I wrote for this site. It's a simple translation layer which re-implements jQuery-based animations to be backed by hardware-accelerated CSS rather than native JavaScript style tweening. This is currently only enabled on the platforms that need it the most, mobile webkit. Other plugins include the ridiculous main navigation tabs, background "slippy titles", layout grid overlay, and more. Like any good Web citizen, the site uses principles of graceful degradation to keep the 5% of you still on IE6 happy.

In addition to custom code, I'm also using several open source projects, including John Resig's jQuery and Color Animation plugin, Carlos Bueno's Sweet Justice for the sweet soft-hyphenated justified body text, Remy Sharp's HTML5-enabling script for IE6, Sea of Cloud's Tweet! plugin, and of course, Tom Preston-Werner's Jekyll. Thanks, guys.

Though it should go without saying, this site, its content, and opinions are my own and in no way represent or are affiliated with my employer.