Tinkering finished
Iâve finished the bulk of the tinkering now, so you should see a shiny new PHP-based design, powered by WordPress. Iâll write more later on why I made the move from Movabletype, but for now Iâm a bit exhausted. Iâve added redirects from the main index page of the old blog, as well as redirects for the individual archive pages, so with any luck, permalinks shouldnât break. Your mileage may varyâ¦
Some of the older entries look odd because I wrote them using Textile, so Iâll gradually clean them up. Let me know what you think. Oh, and donât forget to update your RSS newsreader with the new feed addresses (see the bottom of the sidebar to the right).
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Love the new lookâan elegant mix of the old and the new, which I think is a good thing to do with a weblog redesign. And the best thing of all: it works perfectly in Opera! Did you do a lot of cross-browser testing, or is this just a fine example of what standards-compliant code is all about?
Iâm very interested to read your reasons for switching from MTâIâve just about run out of things to tinker with in my MT build, so perhaps a brand new toy is in order.
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Wow. Nice clean layout.
by Ryan @ 11/04/2004 3:04 pm • Permalink •
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David: ThanksâI was going for an evolution of the design rather than a revolution. I didnât hate the old one, but it was a bit sombre, and I felt it could be a bit brighter and cleaner. Iâm quite happy with the way it turned out, though there are a few rough edges here and there. Iâm glad it works well in Opera. As it happens, I didnât test it extensively (Safari, Omniweb 5 and Firefox for Mac only). I had planned to try browser cam to test Windows browsers, but I had been tinkering for so long, I thought it was about time to let it go in the real world and see what did and didnât work.
WordPress is gloriously standards-compliant out of the box, and has a nice simple structure. Iâve tried to keep to that as much as possible. The only hack is that Iâve set .gif files to replace .png files for IE, using the
!important<abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> rule. Iâll post in more detail about the design and WordPress later.Ryan: Thanks :-D I love these auto-smiliesâ¦
by bsag @ 11/04/2004 5:04 pm • Permalink •
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FYI: For Windows-based browser testing, I recommend ieCaptureâitâs free forever, unlike Browsercam, and offers the latest versions of Firefox and Opera as well as several flavours of IE.
by David @ 11/04/2004 7:05 pm • Permalink •
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Well done! I liked the old design a lot, but this is an improvement.
by ThoughtBadger @ 11/04/2004 9:04 pm • Permalink •
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Love your blog and read it often. Therefore Iâd like to comment upon the style sheet youâre using. The font size is a wee bit small when you view it with IE6 with font-size set to smaller, as I do. So to save me from squinting or having to increase the font-size view thingie whenever I visit your blog, please take a look at how it scales down.
Having said that; nice changes, and good job on the manual you wrote. It is not often that manuals are a fun to read - and heck, it is not often one reads a manual for a tool one doesnât have, for an OS that I donât use.
by Toti @ 11/04/2004 10:04 pm • Permalink •
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David: I hadnât seen that. Worryingly, when I tried it there was a dialog box in the screen capture saying that IE had quit unexpectedly. This site doesnât crash IE does it? Also, the content of the sidebar didnât appear. On the plus side, it looked fine in Opera (as you said) and in the Windows Firefox. And my gif/png replacement worked fine on IE.
ThoughtBadger: Thanks!
Toti: Hmm, sizing fonts seems to be a bit of an arcane art, and everyone seems to disagree on the best policy. I did have the main text of the posts set to 0.9em, so Iâve changed it to 1em now, which should be ânormalâ, whatever that is. It will probably look too big for everyone else now
by bsag @ 12/04/2004 8:04 am • Permalink •
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Ooh this is very elegant in Safari. I really like it. Much cleaner and easier to read. Nice fonts. Is it THAT hard to install on a server? Iâd be curious to know more about this.
by jb @ 12/04/2004 9:04 am • Permalink •
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[Commenting from IE 6 on Win 2K]
Well it didnât crash here, so that was probably just a glitch with ieCapture. And the sidebar does appear, only itâs below the main content [still floated-right though]. The Wings Open Wide thumbnails seem to missing too.
Donât you just hate IE?
by David @ 12/04/2004 9:04 am • Permalink •
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Removing the
widthattribute from the#menuelement fixes the sidebar in IE 6, and doesnât appear to break anything in Opera. Iâd check it out in other browsers though!by David @ 12/04/2004 9:05 am • Permalink •
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David: (Is there a grinding teeth smilie?) I really hate IE. Anyway, Iâve implemented your very clever suggestion in (10), and it works fine in Safari, Omniweb and Mac Firefox. Yay! Now if you could just sort out my hopeless
blockquotestyling, Iâll be a happy woman! :-D All Iâm trying to do is get a block indented left and right by about 10px from the rest of the textânot much to ask, is it? Can I do itâno. Sigh.jb: Thanks. See the next post Why WordPress? for an explanation of installing. To give you the summaryâitâs very easy, provided your host supports PHP and mySQL.
by bsag @ 12/04/2004 5:04 pm • Permalink •
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Re your
Logically
blockquotestyling: I had a quick gander.margin: 0 10px;should do it [zero top and bottom margins, and 10px for the left and right margins], but again you need to remove thewidthattribute from both theblockquoteand the#content pelements. Otherwise thewidthattribute is competing with themarginto fit theblockquoteâs fixed-width paragraphs inside the container#post, and I thinkwidthalways wins.You shouldnât need to specify the width of the
pelement at allâall you want it to do is flow to fill the space left by thewidthminus thepaddingof its parent, right? And thatâs what they do by default.by David @ 12/04/2004 6:04 pm • Permalink •
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Nice redesign, BSAG. Mucho impressed. And, as youâve already observed, it looks fine in Opera and Firefox. IE? We donâ need no steenkinâ IE? :D
by Lyle @ 13/04/2004 7:05 am • Permalink •
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You might want to leave a notice in your old RSS feed letting people know about the redesign and pointing them to the new RSS feed.
by John G @ 13/04/2004 1:04 pm • Permalink •
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David gets at least two bsag Brownie Points for his <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> tips! I am now a happy woman⦠Iâve made the changes and tidied one or two other bits up.
Lyle: I could really do without IE, and do without other people using IE
For some obscure reason, your comment got automatically sent to me to be moderated, as did someone elseâs on another thread. Odd.
John G: I thought I did, actuallyâyou didnât see it?
by bsag @ 13/04/2004 4:04 pm • Permalink •
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Making a point Not that Iâm in it for the money or anything, but I did get kind of a warm fuzzy feeling when, as a result of helping to sort out a couple of niggling CSS bugs [yes IE, Iâm looking atâ¦
by Fuddland @ 14/04/2004 9:05 am • Permalink •
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Hi there. I like your new home. Nice orange highlight colour. (Iâm told that a love of orange is a sign of an unsophisticated person, but theyâre wrong). The yellow looks like Post-Its (oops, Stickies). A little jingly, but OK. The rest of the site is even better than the last one, and you can have tons of my admiration tinged with a little envy.
Is there an RSS feed with both article and comments?
Itâs funny, I read so many things with NetNewsWire I forget that they often look much better in Safari⦠Must âget out moreâ.
by pete @ 15/04/2004 6:04 am • Permalink •
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pete: Jingly?
Iâll probably get bored of the yellow next week and change it to some other colour. Iâm planning on making alternate comments a different colour when I learn enough PHP, so they might be alternating white and yellow background. I havenât managed to combine the articles and comments yet, as the structure is a bit different to the MT format. For now youâll have to put up with separate feeds. I know what you mean about reading things in NetNewsWireâIâve been making more of an effort myself to visit the pages.
by bsag @ 15/04/2004 4:04 pm • Permalink •
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Jingly - probably not the mot juste, but itâs like those optical illusions when you start seeing ghost images flickering in the gaps. A bit like when I wake up in the morning and the sun is streaming through the window - I get these strangely coloured window-shaped after-imagesâ¦
Perhaps using computers is bad for the eyes
by pete @ 16/04/2004 7:04 am • Permalink •
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