Phono Phunk Version 2

28 Aug 2004 09:45 PM

Back in May, I said “something new will be popping up here very soon.” I was working a new design which I thought I’d have ready within a few days. A few days turned into a few weeks. I got busy with work and a few weeks turned into a few months. I finally got a chance to work on it and a couple of thoughts came to me after looking at it again. Did it really look this bad? I’m sure it looked better when I was working on it a month ago! What the hell was I thinking? Well, you get the drift. The new design was crap, so I decided to stick to what I had and tweak it instead. I guess redesigning really is hard to do.

The tweaks I’ve made may not seem big. You probably won’t notice the changes unless you visit the site regularly, so I’ll list the major changes below:

• I got rid of my hand rolled CMS and moved all my data to WordPress. I had to cheat a little and convert my old guest book entries into comments. ;) I guess I’m a real “blogger” now. Don’t get excited though. I won’t be posting much.
• The graphics have been fine-tuned. I’ve added a few more curves, gradients, diagonal lines, colours and new images. Things are a bit more saturated now. I think it looks brighter and much sexier.
• I’ve kept the style switcher, but it does something completely different now. It use to let you change font sizes and the theme of the site. I’m sticking to a single theme now, but I give you the option of choosing between fixed and liquid layouts (my contribution to help us all avoid the debate from hell). The default is fixed because liquid does my head in. Nuff said…
• The XHTML and CSS has been completely redone. The last design was created back in October 2003 and I know so much more about CSS now. Looking back on it, I probably should have stuck to HTML though. I might have to revisit this again when I get time. Additional presentational mark-up has also been added to support the liquid layout. Shit happens. Live with it…
• I’m using negative margins to get a fixed sidebar with liquid content (thanks to Ryan Brill), which lets me place my main content first in the source.
• I can’t be bothered explaining the rest, but you can always view the source (I hope!) .

I’m still tweaking the whole thing as I write this and there are probably a few more important things I’ve forgotten to mention. My memory is shocking these days so you’ll have to excuse me.