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admin, twitter, design, css

Beautifying

Another redesign! This one only 6 months from the last. How remarkable is that?

The base template and heavy CSS of the last design made this change relatively simple. This time around, I’m using YUI Reset and YUI Fonts. I started using both of them a month or two ago on a couple other sites. It’s hard to imagine building a site without them now. They take a lot of headaches out of CSS.

This design is not using YUI Grids. I have used it before, but I don’t think it offers any benefit with this kind of design. It’s more suited toward a content intensive site with many nested divisions. Something like Yahoo’s front page.

You’ll also notice a Twitter feed on the top of the index page. I’ve been trying to figure out what the appeal of Twitter is, but so far, it’s escaped me. I figured embedding tweets on the site would provide extra encouragement for me to try it out. I think Twitter may lend itself to my summer on the road, too. So, we’ll see how long that lasts. It seems to be noticeably slow, so I might have to find another way to pull the data.

Another new feature is tags. I started tagging posts a while ago, but haven’t displayed them till now. The majority of posts are not tagged. Maybe someday I’ll go back and tag the 1,300 old posts – but I doubt it.

Some kinks of the design are still being worked out, but if you notice anything strange – whether it be from the redesign, server move, or mail move – let me know.

admin, design, css

A Redesign

So, things are looking a little different around here, no? I’ve had this design floating around in the grey-matter for a spell, but I didn’t think I’d start on it for a while yet.

Then I got bored.

I whipped it up last night and today. A lot quicker than I thought. There’s still a few tweaks I want to make, but it looks so much better than the last one, I decided to put it up before it was polished.

The design is very CSS heavy – though “heavy” might not be the right descriptor, as the whole thing is rather quite light in terms of size. CSS dependent. How’s that? The last few visions of this site have been CSS dependent, but in this one – inspired in large part by CSS Zen Garden – I’ve done my best to take out all styling from the pages and put it in the stylesheet. Of course, there’s probably a bit of legacy styling lurking here-and-there in various old blog posts. Let me know if you stumble on any.

The design has been tested in Firefox on both OS X and Ubuntu, as well as Safari in OS X. Let me know if you stumble upon any bugs, unless you’re using IE. Actually, if you’re using IE and want to send in a screenshot, I’d be curious to see how the site renders.

I’m sure someone will be curious about the stripes. I put them in there as a joke and placeholder till I figured out what I wanted to do with the background, but hell if they don’t look halfway decent. (It always ends up with me that some of the best design features start as jokes are bugs.) So, for now, they stay.

admin, design, css

XI

There’s nothing like a redesign to welcome Spring in (and it is Spring – I’ve seen Mosquito buzzing around and, just today, berries growing on Oregon Grape.) The inspiration hit me yesterday morning, and I whipped it up in a day. It’s a little more Web 2.0-ish, but I haven’t completely fallen to the darkside – no gradients or rounded corners.

A marked improvement from the previous design.

I twiddled my thumbs for a while, trying to think of a way to display everything that used to be in the sidebar, before I decided that it was overrated. So, you’ll now find the search box at the bottom of the page and a shiny new Archives page, brought to you by the Clean Archives Plug-in. It’s not exactly dial-up friendly, so I’ll probably fiddle with it a bit more in the future.

How do you like the “pig-monkey.com…” bit over to the right? That was totally a fluke. It wasn’t supposed to end-up there, but I thought it looked good.

As usual, I have no idea what version this is, so it’s been assigned the arbitrary number of 11. Let me know if you find any bugs. Unless you’re using Internet Explorer. I know the site looks funky in that pile of shit. (And I mean no offense to piles of shit. They’re productive members of our society.)