And now, for a quick spot of live site editing

Post­ing this prob­a­bly means the RSS users are going to come crawl­ing out in force to watch as I break stuff, but what­ever. I don’t really mind, enjoy, if you get kicks out of that kind of thing. I’m play­ing with styles/my tem­plate for a lit­tle bit, because I’m bored of it and ridicu­lously sick of how slow Fire­fox ren­ders position:fixed and my Google ads (and you can say it’s because Google ads markup sucks all you want, but the fact is Fire­fox is the only browser that has any sig­nif­i­cant problem(/s) with it). Mostly because I’m bored of it and am putting off work on… a hand­ful of other sites. Oh, and study, but that doesn’t matter/count coz my next exam is still over a week away.

Think of it as CSS Reboot a day or two late. Or what­ever. I’ve actu­ally had the base of the stylesheet ready for a while, but it was ini­tially designed as a print ver­sion. Then I decided it was sim­ple (which is what I’m aim­ing for a lot lately) and looked niceish. I think I was sub­con­sciously (or maybe not? I dunno) tak­ing off Anne’s now-not-so-recent site redesign, which basi­cally involved revert­ing to a sin­gle col­umn with clear read­able text and dis­abling com­ments more often. I’m not so keen on the lat­ter as last time I tried to do that peo­ple got annoyed, and it was mostly just because (I think) I was post­ing dumb angsty stuff I didn’t really want peo­ple reply­ing to. Maybe. Or not. That might’ve been the time before… I can’t remem­ber, too long ago. I’m also not so keen on big rants about hard­core markup stuff. I could deal with liv­ing in Scan­de­navia, though, because those coun­tries are cool. I don’t really know why. I told Tori this today and she gave me weird looks like I’m stalk­ing Hen­rik Ibsen. I’m not. I just think he’s a cool play­wright, and am appre­cia­tive of his char­ac­ters and ide­olo­gies. Heh, on more triv­ial mat­ters, I like the idea of extended char­ac­ter sets because it gives me an excuse to use UTF-8 more often.

Any­way. What­ever. Before I start mak­ing changes, mostly for his­tor­i­cal pur­poses, this design involves large expanses of white, a fixed-width lay­out (so I can think about wor­ry­ing about pho­tos less), and none of the larger graph­i­cal ele­ments from SC500 are being retained. I’ll prob­a­bly find it bor­ing around Feb­ru­ary, (I’d say sooner, but I’m going to be AFK for nearly a month, so that extends its nov­elty value some­what fur­ther) at which point I’ll prob­a­bly go with some­thing complex(-er).

Hav­ing said that, my present design (the one I’m about to start imple­ment­ing) could grad­u­ally evolve to a more com­plex beast, in which case I’ll get sick of its evolved com­plex­ity and go back to some­thing sim­ple again. Ah, design. It’s cyclic.

I also have some inter­est­ing ideas for livesearch/navigation, loosely based on Shaun Inman’s present site and Matthom’s recent com­ments on search. Which I want to imple­ment quickly to beat him to it ;-) Basi­cally it’s fig­ur­ing out a lay­out that intu­itively com­bines search, whilst remain­ing “blog-like” (because I value that, see my com­ment on Matthom’s orig­i­nal post) and visu­ally simple.

Tags: , , , ,

posted on Thursday, November 3rd, 2005 at 7:54 pm by Josh Street, filed under Design, Geek, Life.

12 Responses to “And now, for a quick spot of live site editing”

  1. kitten says:

    hav­ing just checked outs Anne’s “new”, style it reminds me of… a web page that microsoft word out putted where there is noth­ing, one col­umn could be really nice, and white works well in terms of con­trast­ing and the whole black/white thing that peo­ple seem to be drift­ing towards (at least sub­con­siously) BUT i think her nar­row columned, white­washed page is actu­ally lack­ing cre­ativ­ity, it can be orig­i­nal to be plain, but is it tru­ely orig­i­nal to be blank?

    i dont know, i just dont like it

    im look­ing for­ward to see­ing your new design though

  2. Josh says:

    Anne is a guy.

    (And, you don’t have to like the new design, it’s okay :P I promise to come up with some­thing un-plain for cat-scan!)

  3. Sam says:

    Ha, I’m will­ing to bet (in non-monetary terms) that Anne is a Mac user, sim­ply from his design layout.

    Hmmm, typ­ing ref­er­ences to Anne’s mas­culity feels decid­edly unnatural.

  4. Josh says:

    Sam… I wouldn’t have picked that from what he writes… though that’s more my entrenched think­ing than any­thing else :P My line of argu­ment would be that he’s too tech­ni­cally minded for a Mac user ;-) Pos­si­bly false, though.

    If you’d seen his last design you might not think of him as a Mac user. This is vary sparse compared.

  5. Sam says:

    Sam… I wouldn’t have picked that from what he writes… though that’s more my entrenched think­ing than any­thing else :P My line of argu­ment would be that he’s too tech­ni­cally minded for a Mac user ;-) Pos­si­bly false, though.

    I was refer­ing to the over­done, incred­i­ble “white­ness” of the whole page, not its con­tent. Its so white it’s prac­ti­cally blind­ing. *puts on ski goggles*

  6. dale says:

    he’s too tech­ni­cally minded for a Mac user

    No we’ve just evolved quicker than every­one else and are sick of PCs ;)

  7. Sam says:

    Josh, your search bar thing scores very low points for usabil­ity and function… :-(

  8. Josh says:

    Is that an obser­va­tion just now? Coz I’m cur­rently screw­ing with it, so… will get bet­ter, I promise! (Prob­a­bly couldn’t get much worse right now. Bloody “plu­gin” thing is ridicu­lously hor­ri­ble, must sig­nif­i­cantly change the way it works.)

    Sorry!

  9. Sam says:

    Com­ment by Sam — Sat­ur­day, 5th Novem­ber, 2005 @ 11:48 am

    Com­ment by Josh — Sat­ur­day, 5th Novem­ber, 2005 @ 11:57 am

    Holy Mother of Frogs, you ‘answered’ the ques­tion before I posted it? Seri­ously dude, your site is screwed. Unless you man­aged to fix the day­light savings.

    It was an obser­va­tion of the afore­men­tioned variety .

  10. Josh says:

    Um? I promise I haven’t edited your com­ment… isn’t 11.48 before 11.57?

  11. Sam says:

    OH! I read it as 58.

    Haha! I sup­pose this is what you have to look for­ward to when, like me, you add an extra year to your non-mathematical study!

  12. Sam says:

    Ummmm… I’m actu­ally begin­ning to think that I did read them cor­rectly, but was some­how con­vinced that they were going back­wards anyway.

    Oh dear.

Leave a Reply