I finally got fed up with using a default style from movable type. Over the weekend I found took some time and created a new design. I hope you like how things have changed around here!
I'm not very much of a designer - my skills in coding far outweigh my design skills, but I wanted to create something simple and a little nicer on the eyes. The default template was alright, but a lot of people were using it and I didn't want my weblog to get confused with anyone else's. Hopefully I've succeeded in creating a smooth template... although the white text in the header may be a little hard to read.
I haven't done extensive browser testing with the new design. It looks right in Mozilla and IE 6 on my PC. However, IE 6 doesn't always render the border element correctly on the individual archive and monthly archive pages. If you scroll the page down, and then scroll back up, the border magically appears. I'd report it as a bug, but I doubt they'd ever fix it.
I believe the site looks alright on IE 5.2 on the Mac, but I haven't tested that completely. If you see anything out of whack, please let me know so I can tweak the CSS a bit. I'm concerned about the display of my code blocks the most.
I also used the Monotype Corsiva font for the date text. I don't believe this font is available for the Mac, so at some point I'll be embedding the font in a Flash movie, and using that to display the text.
In theory, I can embed the font outlines in a dynamic text field and then pass in the text to display as a flashVar in the object/embed tags. I'm not quite sure how that will work with the CSS support and if it will display like I want it to... I'll probably just resort to picking a more common font, but I liked the "elegance" of the cursive writing.
So what do you think? Be gentle, I'm not a designer. :-)
8 Comments
Your new design looks quite fetching with both Firefox 0.8 and Internet Explorer 6 under Windows XP. I haven't been able to reproduce your border bug, though I haven't done more than load a few pages.
On the Macintosh OS X, a cursory inspection with Safari 1.0 also reveals very good looking pages. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer 5.2 chokes on the code blocks and only seems to display the border and a single empty line, making them completely unreadable. :(
The only other immediately apparent thing I've noticed is that the code blocks' border render totally differently under different browsers, probably due to the differing understandings and support for patterned borders, e.g.:
Internet Explorer 6: dashed borders
Firefox 0.8: dotted borders
Internet Explorer 5.2 (Mac): solid, no content
Safari 1.0: solid borders
My only major concern for you would be the disappearing code blocks under Internet Explorer 5.2 (and probably 5.1, which also uses the Tasman renderer) on the Macintosh.
Posted by: Jim Cheng | February 11, 2004 7:21 PM
i think it looks nice and bright :)
good job!
Posted by: klaut | February 11, 2004 7:21 PM
Hehe, I was getting worried. Meant to send an email when I got home to urge you to upload what you had done as I thought it was nice.
My only suggestion is make the minimum size of the block in the middle like 400 or something as it is currently fixed at like 600 or something; I can't resize it.
Posted by: JesterXL | February 11, 2004 7:35 PM
Welcoming, bright, friendly - all peachy :)
(Internet Explorer 5.2: good catch from Jim, but looking at the target group of a site like this I wouldn't be overly worried about it...)
Posted by: Andreas Weber | February 12, 2004 1:23 AM
I actually liked your previous design more. There was enough room for code etc. Now I have to scroll the scrollbox in order too see the hidden part. And it actually distracts a bit (more). I am not used to copy-paste your code into Flash to see it working, but I usually try to skim the best snippets (of algorithms) from your examples and try to understand them. After all, I _see_ the Matrix without executing it in the Flash compiler :P
But keep up the good work, I'll definitely check back to check your code!
Posted by: margus | February 12, 2004 2:56 AM
Looks good here in Safari 1.2 as well. I think that contrast-wise though things could be improved a bit. Some of the text is hard to read on my Powerbook - it's a little too light and all blends in together.
As a couple others hinted at above, I'm sure the majority of folks who would visit here are sophisticated enough to use "real" browsers - or at least ones that play nicely with CSS and XHTML.
Keep up the great work!
Posted by: Scott Boms | February 12, 2004 2:52 PM
Hello, I am interresting by the font embedded swf for title. I have not take the time to develop it but i want to do one also.
I see this trick on some websites :
quasimodo:
http://www.quasimondo.com
ESPN for the article title
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=kurkjian_tim&id=1733473
VH1 for the artist title :
http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/add_n_to_x/artist.jhtml
Posted by: antoine | February 12, 2004 3:04 PM
Talking about using Flash files to display a headline font: I've done that pretty excessively on my other blog: http://www.blogger-dir-einen.de and it's actually super easy. You just pass the headline via flashVars. For search engines I would add the headline again inside a noscript tag, so it gets indexed.
Posted by: Mario Klingemann | February 12, 2004 3:31 PM