And now, for a quick spot of live site editing
03 Nov 2005Posting 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.