Category: Burningbird

Most people liked the change to the serif fonts, but not all. So I took the Delacour route and have implemented a style switcher.

Hopefully you’ll see the default of this weblog when you load the page the first time. If you don’t let me know, or move to the bottom of the page and click one of the style buttons: serif or sans.

The style switcher does cause a very small lag in load times, which is why I didn’t want use it. But if some of you are having a hard time reading the serif fonts, the lag will just have to be something we live with. Some tweaking of the common bits out into a third stylesheet that is loaded automatically should take care of most of this.

update

As you might also notice, I’ve finished my all about me bar, which is now under the main title on all the pages.

The Feed Me page lists all the various ways to feed the bird, including hiring and sponsoring. I may have pulled ads, but I am open to sponsors–especially if its a product I can get behind. I’m still adding to the Writings page, but it gives a sampling of my work. The Resumé page is very detailed, and very long–much longer than normally recommended. However, a few years back, it wasn’t unusual for me to be working two or more consulting jobs, writing for a couple of publications, and working on a book, all at the same time. The resumé tries to cover all the different types of work and technologies I was involved with at the time.

I’ve also had people say they like my longer resumé and others say they don’t. Such is life — I’d rather give people too much, than too little.

(I think you can also see why no company will hire me for a permanent position–not with that much consulting and independent contracting behind me.)

Besides, I think it’s about time I started selling myself, rather than indulge in the all too typical female modesty, with all the disclaimers of “Aaw shucks, it ain’t no big thang”. If I continue, I’m going to female modesty myself right out of a car, computer, and Net connection. Then where would you all be? There’d be this dead void in your syndication feed lists where the Bird used to be.

Of course, having said all of this–I would like feedback on the pages. Especially that resumé page. What think? Does it help? Or hurt? I may be stubborn but I’m not mulish, and if it’s too long, or provides way too much info, I’ll cut it back.

update

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’ve changed my main content font to Georgia, and I like it much better. I have experimented around with serif fonts in the past, but couldn’t find the right combination of line height, font height, and color to suit. However, when I downloaded the CSS Zen Garden template, I liked what Dave Shea used immediately and decided to use it in Bb–without the text justification.

I’m also using a serif font for the title now, but still using Verdana for sidebar and new static menu at the top. I’m assuming mixing serif and san-serif fonts is not a page fashion faux pax*.

Another tidbit in “The Zen of CSS Design” is to use caution with letter spacing, especially with lowercase characters. I admit I am using a tight letterspacing with my post titles, but I found that the titles seemed to go on forever without it. Even after reading the warning, it’s a gamble I’ll still take — bring on the sheep!

In the end, though, it’s good to be aware of the rules of thumb and ‘laws’ of layout and design; then if you break them, it’s because you really want to, not because you’re unaware of the possibility that your site could look like shite on most people’s boxes.

*feedback would be welcome — and suggestions for the sidebar font.

I’m working on some components of Wordform in the next few days that could impact on weblog viewing and/or your comments. One of the downsides for modifying a ‘live’ application–but a great way to test. However, if you write a long comment, you might want to copy it into the clipboard before posting.

Also, if you notice that the site is running slow, after checking the running processes I found there is a great deal of activity associated with mt-comments.cgi now, as well as MySQL so I imagine there’s another comment/trackback flood going on with the server.