Nathan got me thinking about redesigning my CSS, and I think I’m going to.
I’m leaning towards getting rid of all images in the backgrounds; I go back and forth on whether it’s annoying or cool.
It did take a little while for me to put together the main one I’m using now, and a couple of minutes to do the squiggly line one that no one probably even notices, but I don’t know if they really add anything important to the feel of the site. Heck, those Chinese characters have been up there since the beginning, and no one has ever asked what they mean.
I just realized that I’m talking like this thing has been up forever, and it’s actually only been half a month…. Anyway, let me know if you have any opinions / suggestions on the image issue.
17 Comments
fwiw I like the Asian design. It’s refreshing. I can’t view the whole page on my screen though unless I switch to 1024×768 which kills my eyes. I think people waste time with the design elements of blogs. I’m looking for content, which there’s plenty of here.
I am with Michel on the content.
I change my blog weekly because its my hobby. If you like it then other people don’t really matter.
Maybe it you wanted to change it up a little you could get rid of the left column and stretch the text out to the left, of wait thats my site.
Off topic but who is your host? Or do you not have one still?
my main thing is that you make it variable width.
i actually assumed your were using a prepackaged template which is why i never asked what the symbols mean. so now i guess i’m obligated to ask…
Can you make variable width with templates like Jared’s and mine?
of course, my current template is the same thing (a three column design)…
Wow, look at all this feedback! Thanks, everyone.
It mostly confirms my feelings on the issue: wanting to focus on content, and specifically allowing for a variety of screen sizes (including PDA and cell phone), thus getting rid of the huge background image and other properties preventing text from being read easily on the small screens.
I will have to look back in Photoshop and get what words each symbol represents, as I used them for the layer names for each symbol. (guess I should have been prepared for that after throwing out the comment). Also, I do have to admit that it was mostly out of the box (the one from Sara’s blog - although I didn’t know that at the time), with some color and image changes that I did myself.
BTW, mine is actually just two-column, the image just gives the illusion of a left colum, but the “center” column is actually just padded out past the left bar in the background graphic.
Also - Dan, if you were a true hax0r you could easily figure out what hosting service I’m currently using, so I’ll leave that as a exercise for the reader
I used to be very happy running Open BSD 3.5 on an old Pentium box in my garage, but that was in the good old Speakeasy DSL days. Now that I am on cable it would be a violation of my terms of service to host a web & mail servers at home as I was before.
I can’t believe I just used an ascii smiley face; I will go punish myself now. Also, I forgot to spell-check those last two comment posts, so hopefully there are no embarrassing errors. Did I mention that Firefox has a great spell checker extension? Right-click on any text box, then “Check Spelling” - very handy.
I will figure it out. It isnt hard but easier to ask.
I will hack you.
Two things:
You cant make the text variable with images as the backgrounds, Stryker you use gradients and color. Am I right? probably not.
Jared you can get a hack for wordpress that will give you a mobile blog, go to alex kings site.
the gradiant on my blog is a background image.
I will look to see how you did it then.
Jared can you email me that extension for spell checking? Mozilla is down.
I got it SpellBound is the one right?
You like having 14 comments for this post? irrelavent or not.
http://lunarpages.com/
Congratulations (on the host lookup)! Yes, SpellBound is the checker that I was referring to. I don’t mind the number of comments, since they are (for the most part) still on-topic (site design). If it gets crazy I can turn off comments for this particular story.
This might be the only reason to have a tagboard. But dont give in. How did you stumble upon lunarpages? I am sick of my current host and I need to do cron jobs, have more then one ftp account, unlimited domain forwards and have shell access. Oh and most importantly have a better uptime, mine sucks.
I just looked at a whole bunch and they seemed to have a good price for the features they offered. J2EE support was a requirement for me, so that narrowed the field quite a bit. So far, so good; I have no complaints yet. If it was for a commercial site I would do more thorough research on uptime, but it has been fine for me - hasn’t gone down yet that I am aware of.