Digg ThisOK, so the feed was down for a few. I had a parse error on my archives page, which downed my feed. It’s now corrected.
One of the things that ticks me about scripting languages is the idea that if you have one simple character mis-typed, missing, or otherwise impaired, it impairs the whole shooting match. There’s nothing I can do about it, so there’s no use complaining about it — just fix it and move on.
This, my annual “Go Bucks!” style, is only a temporary design until about Thanksgiving, when I will change the theme over to yet another theme (”Denim & Dinge”) with this same layout and structure. The color palette is the same as the old Bend, except it’s been re-arranged a bit, and the denim image is coming back.
The site’s been restructured, too: I moved the archive links, the calendar, etc. over to their own page; it simply makes more sense to do it that way. In so doing, I also revamped a little of WordPress’ output code to simplify the links: it now puts out one, simple unordered list instead of several lists and several embedded lists. It’s much easier to style now. In fact, I was able to cut out close to 100 lines out of the style sheet. I cut another 100 lines or so out of the CSS file with this layout as well, which makes the site a touch quicker and a lot easier to manage, style-wise.
I’ve been toying with this layout for over 18 months now, and I finally decided to do it: the layout is not liquid, not ice; it’s what they call “jell-o.” If you have a wide-screen monitor, and your browser is not maximized, you can click and hold on the lower right corner of your browser and resize it and the content area resizes along with it — to a point. It has both minimum and maximum widths, so it will maximize the use of screen real estate in any resolution.
This way, it looks good at 800 x 600, and it doesn’t look whacked at 1440 x 900 (like on my screen). It’s a usability thing: easier for the reader, and easier for me. Easier for me means that I’ll spend less time maintaining the site and more time doing what I need to do — and that’s a Good Thing.
Now I haven’t yet tested it in IE7, so if you see something in IE7 that is a little whacked, please let me know; most of the JavaScript that holds this site together in IE is set in conditionals specific to IE 6 and below, so it really shouldn’t break.
That being said, it’ll probably be totally borked in IE7…
