On a job well done indeed; the blog now has a plethora of additional content to bolster its already formidable bank of thoughts, along with a few other cosmetic changes.
Where to begin?
The most obvious change, of course, is the introduction of sans-serif text into the sidebars, which is kind of a slight contradiction to the ideals that I had for this layout. I had intended for the entire site to contain only, and only serif typefaces, but I found that, over time, the readability of such a typeface (Georgia, as a matter of fact) was less than desirable. It has now been changed, and hopefully it will be embraced.
Now about that content. You’ll notice the new search bar, which actually makes use of Google to search through this domain for terms that you deem relevant, and desire to find more of. It’s been a very, very long time since I last dealt with HTML forms, so I hope my attempt at giving it some spice went off well. At least now searching my own blog for stuff will be easier.
You’ll see that posts now have a slightly different template, with a brand-new post footer, complete with an additional permalink to each post. Also, at the very bottom of the entire page, I’ve added the indispensable “Last 10 Most Recent Entries” section, which should help you navigate the site better if you happen to subscribe to this blog via RSS.
I also had to design a few icons to go with the upgrades, as you’d probably have realized by now. Many of them went unused in the end (I had a really great idea for a search bar and submit button before deciding to scrap them in favour of just plain CSS, I still have them on my hard disk though) but the main additions are the new search icon, the permalink icon and the ‘Written By’ icon. Not much, but hey, designing 16 x 16 px stuff isn’t exactly a walk in the park. A couple more may be coming with additional updates.
If you’re thinking that the serif fonts aren’t the only thing that’s changed, you’d be right. I’ve just converted about 75% of this site’s stylesheet to use em units instead of pixels, as I had previously been advocating. They do happen to involve some approximation, which would explain why the site may appear slightly different from what you remember.
I’m still working on getting my labels working; it appears that Blogger sites not published via their own servers are not able to make use of the new ‘Layout’ features that have come with the new Blogger upgrade. I do, however, have an idea for a half-workaround, and I’ll be testing that very shortly. As soon as I get my eyes away from the screen for a couple of minutes for a break; I’ve been doing this for about 4 hours straight now.
You may also be slightly disgusted with the sidebar content on the other pages; I’m working on that. Expect more diversity in those dratted right columns soon.
And yes, this site still validates fine and is cross-browser compliant. Except for the PSP and other handhelds, though; I’m also planning to work on that, along with a print-friendly version.
Amazing just how much effort goes into making a simple template for a site, isn’t it?
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