12 June 2004 Archives

I did testing of the new look in the validation engines, and several different browsers and it seems to work. I am aware of the float problem with IE 6.0 and will dig up the work around and add it. I’m getting to the point where if I no longer support Netscape 4.x, I don’t want to support IE 6.x, either.

But it is widely used so if you’re using it, be aware that I working the problem.

I have other new styles to add in addition to the ones you have now, but I’ll leave those for next week. I myself switch between Fire & Ice and Lemon Shake-Ups, depending if I’m in the mood for summer or winter. Shake-Ups is a bit busy, but it suits the photo at the top and is very cheerful.

Speaking of photos, yes I am using photos in the sidebar and yes it can slow load times. Hopefully once they cache, their bandwidth burden should be minimized.

The ice photos used in Fire & Ice are from the NOAA public libraries and they are lovely, aren’t they? The other photos that aren’t NOAA’s or mine are from Jon Sullivan who has generously placed most of his wonderful work into the public domain. (Jon has a weblog here. Read his disclaimer at the bottom for a giggle.) I will be using more of Jon’s work in upcoming styles.

I either created the clipart or downloaded it from the free clipart pages at about.com.

If you can try these different stylesheets in your browser and drop me a note and let me know what does or doesn’t work, I’d be appreciative. This is a very major change, and I imagine the site will be rough for a week, until I finish the transition.

I’ve had the old colors and look for so long, when I come to the pages, it doesn’t feel like my site. But change is good. Thanks again for those who have commented and tested; a special thanks to Roger for helping me with the Burningbird title positioning.

Fixed the layout problem in Safari and IE – I had an unclosed DIV tag within my last post (my update block).

Rah!

Though I work primarily with backend development, my start in writing was front end design and development, working with Javascript and CSS. I know, hard to imagine.

Lately though, I’ve been in a design mood, and have designed a new format for this weblog, which you can see at the test weblog. I’ve borrowed Michael Hanscom’s idea of a style switcher, and his Javascript, and have created three styles so far. I have five more in the wings, waiting to finish, but you can see what I have now.

The (F) and (S) designate fixed background image or sliding. So far my favorite design is Fire and Ice, inspired by a posting title by Rogi. Check out the sidebar that changes with each stylesheet. The photos change in and around the ‘floating cloud’ segmented sidebar, as someone named it, and a lovely name it is. The difference from the original design is that I am now going fully centered.

I still need to play around with the stylesheets, make sure it works with the browsers I plan on supporting. And I have one last challenge – the Burningbird title. I want it to right align with the box holding the post text, but haven’t figured it out yet. If anyone has any ideas, I’d appreciate hearing about them.

Found, thanks to Roger.

This has been fun. Much more fun than being a pain in the butt to the WordPress people. But not as fun as paddle-ball, Dave.

Nice safe, topic.