Happy Birthday to me, new site design
Life, Website 05/03/2004 |First things first: I’m 31 today. Woohoo! Go me. 
Now that that’s over with, I’m also turning on the “new” site design. As I mentioned before, visually it’s only a partial redesign, in that I’ve moved it from a single-column layout to a two-column layout. Code-wise, however, it’s been redone from the ground up. The majority of the work is done though, aside from some work on fleshing out the sidebar and fine tuning things.
Of course, that means that there are very likely bugs. Feel free to post anything you might notice in comments, and I’ll get it taken care of as soon as I can.
(TypePad’s caching mechanisms may be playing games with my stylesheet — while the new stylesheet is in the system, they seem to be serving the old stylesheet. If things look completely wonky at the moment, that’s likely why, and there probably won’t be much I or anyone else can do until the servers catch up with the changes I made. Sigh.)
iTunes: “Difficult Listening Hour - 02v2” by Various Artists from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2000, 1:04:41).
[See also: ecto beta available | The Incredibles | Surf like it’s 1994! | Ducks in the city | And the day winds down… ]
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29 Responses to “Happy Birthday to me, new site design”
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fpz
Gavriel
medhat abbas
Ryan Waddell
Sponge Bob
May 3rd, 2004 at 4:20 am
Happy birthday
As for visual “bugs”… The old “I’m too sexy for my blog” tagline appears (on Firefox running on WinXP) to be down with the navigation, other than that it all looks pretty cool
May 3rd, 2004 at 4:55 am
Happy Birthday!
May 3rd, 2004 at 5:29 am
Happy Birthday Michael.
I have a small gift for you a picture of which is posted over at my place. We’ll need to make arrangements to get it to you.
Its small and heavy. No its not a gold bar. Its breakable.
May 3rd, 2004 at 7:12 am
Happy Birthday!
May 3rd, 2004 at 7:59 am
Happy Birthday - A spring baby, eh - What were your folks doing in August the year before you were born?
And, on the redesign - is ragged right on the left column and ragged left on the right column the look you were wanting? It seems a bit - well - ragged.
May 3rd, 2004 at 8:51 am
Interesting display in Firefox 0.6/Win2k3/1600x1200 — certain greyscales overlap oddly (IE 6.0, the greyscales just don’t display). The columns are quite nice, but I might wish for an extra .25” or so of white space between the columns for readability.
Oh, and the .css file gets captured in internal proxies for people reading at work. Make sure (on windows, anyway) to control-f5 to force the proxy to re-get all information.
screenshot sent to your email.
May 3rd, 2004 at 9:05 am
I’m assuming it’s just a CSS caching error right now, but yeah - your right column headers go all the way across the blog.
May 3rd, 2004 at 9:07 am
Happy Birthday! w00t!
May 3rd, 2004 at 9:09 am
yeah, i’m having the same problem as ryan - firefox, win2k. the right column headers TEXT is fine, but the borders are extending over the full width of the container - crossing under your posts it looks like.
you aren’t using stacking are you?
i see here is centered over content column, there over sidebar - then bookshelf is repeated - once in ‘header’ format, once below in very LARGE type.
i also think it would be nice if the text in your sidebar was smaller. right now it’s competing with your content column. the text under your bookshelf selection is a good size - if you converted your blogroll to the same size it would be much easier to see where you should look first - it looks like your Typepad users list is that size, so it’s just getting your superlong blogroll into the same format.
more white space will help too, between your columns.
finally - ‘stealing makes baby jesus cry’ cracked me the fuck up! i needed that.
happy birthday!
May 3rd, 2004 at 9:29 am
also, i think your first post is being displayed twice…
May 3rd, 2004 at 9:30 am
Whee! Redesigning is fun!
(laughs)
For reference, here’s my test page, which, of course, works fine. I knew there would be issues when I started the rebuild last night, but didn’t want to stay up any longer to find out just what they would be. Looks like I’ve definitely got some work to do, huh?
Thanks for all the input — now, let’s see what I can do about this mess.
May 3rd, 2004 at 9:49 am
From your test page the new design looks great - and have a happy birthday!
May 3rd, 2004 at 10:30 am
hey, it looks like you fixed it!
yay!
May 3rd, 2004 at 10:39 am
Okay, I’ve managed to get the sidebar behaving. Funny the difference it can make when you remember to define a section as an id rather than a class. Details, details.
I’ve had to take out the list of recently updated TypePad sites, unfortunately, as their javascript include has a h2 in it that I can’t get rid of (or at least, I don’t know of a way to get rid of it [though now that I’m typing this out, I can probably use CSS to give it a display: none; property, while still letting the list of sites show…so maybe it’ll come back]).
The site “I’m too sexy…” tagline should be back where it belongs now (that, I believe, was a stylesheet caching issue).
Ragged right for the main content and ragged left for the sidebar is what I’m playing with right now, though I may try a full-justification for one or the other (or both) if I decide I don’t like this.
Opening up a little space between the columns wouldn’t be a bad idea at all, I’ll just have to figure out how many pixels to shrink things by.
I also need to define the “Posted on…” lines just after people’s names in comments so that they display the way they should. Gotta think on the best way to do that one, as I’ve changed the way I’ve been handling some of the CSS (less class definitions, more work with descendant selectors).
The first post displaying twice was simply a goof-up on my part, easily fixed.
And, of course, thanks for all the birthday wishes!
Off to work now, unfortunately, so any further fine-tuning will need to wait until tonight.
May 3rd, 2004 at 11:18 am
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KIDDO. I WAS THERE, 31 YEARS AGO, WHEN YOU RELUCTANTLY ENTERED THE WORLD! IF THAT IS NOT CAUSE FOR “SHOUTING,” WHAT IS?
LOVE
DAD
May 3rd, 2004 at 11:53 am
Happy Birthday.
Site looks good.
May 3rd, 2004 at 12:56 pm
Happy Birthday Michael!
May 3rd, 2004 at 1:13 pm
Happy Birthday Michael! I like the new look too. Keep up the great work.
May 3rd, 2004 at 1:35 pm
Yay, Firefox displays correctly now! I do like the new look quite a bit — Why you’re still not working in IT and UI design is a mystery to me. You really need to polish your resume and keep looking for web design opportunities. Then you know you can wear the UK to work…
As an aside, three more thoughts (Anal nitpicks. Whatever. ;-)):
IE 6.0/2k3 still doesn’t display the greyscale, (I use it so infrequently I don’t know if it ever did…)
IE 6.0/2k3 now displays the “There” column below the “Here” column — as if diagonally oposite in a 4 box table — i.e., (“-” = empty columns)
H - H - H - - T - T - T
I’ve got a suggestion for your copyright line, but it’s not safe to look up at work, so I’ll tell ya later.
May 3rd, 2004 at 3:14 pm
Okay now I can say happy birthday!!
May 3rd, 2004 at 3:33 pm
Happy Birthday Michael!
May 3rd, 2004 at 6:25 pm
happy 31st. em and i just wanted to congratulate you on surviving another year. all the wiser now ( for sure ). it looked like you had a great pre party weekend. i still want to post some photos on the fam website. how do i do this. i also want to get you a pocket watch if you have not splurged on yourself yet. sorry im so slow with everything but you know how i am. send me an update when you have a minute. kevin and emily
May 3rd, 2004 at 7:54 pm
hey happy birthday! where are your you-in-kilt fotos?
May 3rd, 2004 at 8:59 pm
Happy birth day, Babycakes! raises his beer in salute
May 3rd, 2004 at 10:53 pm
It’s not my fault IE sucks. Get a real browser.
I don’t care. I’m not even going to bother fixing the various oddities that crop up under IE. It’s not worth the time, trouble, and headaches that it would entail.
May 4th, 2004 at 2:43 am
Thanks everyone! That was a lot more responses than I was expecting…I guess I’ve managed to get more than just five regular readers by now, huh?
I’m sure that more kilt photos will show up as the summer progresses. One of the few downsides to being a shutterbug is that I’m always the one behind the camera, and really don’t have all that many pictures of myself to toss up. Give it time, though, and I’ll see what can be done to rectify that little oversight.
May 5th, 2004 at 8:33 am
Hoppy Bird Day, you young pup!
I don’t think this is related to IE: do you have background-color set in body? I’m seeing my default window color and not white which I think was the color you wanted. An easy omission to make! That’s why I set my default to non-white, to catch myself.
May 6th, 2004 at 10:00 am
Whoops! No, that wasn’t in there. It is now, though — thanks!
May 18th, 2004 at 11:55 pm
All you need is love and powdered sugar
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