Redesign Complete

From our stating-the-blindingly-obvious department:

You might have noticed this website has just undergone a complete face-lifting…
For the sake of argument, we’ll say it’s not completely finished… But mostly, it is.

It should look good, or acceptable, on every browsers. If it doesn’t, please let me know. But as usual I can only stress how much better it’s likely to look on real browsers (not Microsoft’s twisted version thereof).

I still need to brush up the menu content at the top of this page (organize, add some more items, update my bookmark list etc), but everything else is now in place. And all modesty aside, I dare say it kicks major ass.

Let me use this occasion to invite longtime RSS reader to pay a quick visit to the online version… While I won’t be stopping to provide full-content RSS any time soon, there are in fact many other incentives to checking the page itself that are not visible in the RSS feed.

For your benefits (and the benefit of other less sharp readers who might have missed hidden jewels of this corporate behemoth of entertainment we run here), let me list a few:

  • Post layout: keitai logs entries are now automatically arranged along with text content to be shown in context and without disrupting the flow of entries
  • Theme colors have been carefully chosen after month of careful scientific studies: including ancient Chinese art of sacred color matching, Freudian color coding and clinical studies in text readability and its affect on optical nerve fatigue. For the doubtful among you: I bet you didn’t know it’s been firmly established by many studies that black on white background is less than ideal for text-reading on a computer, while a light shade of grey as a background is to be preferred (and you thought my choices were purely coincidental. ha!).
  • Comments: not only do I love to hear my distinguished readers pitch in on the conversation (we favor murmurs of assentiment and wild praises, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., but we also tolerate the occasional big fat hairy troll dissenting individual), but also, thanks to Marc’s awesome Subscribe to Comment 2.0, you can get replies to your comments emailed to you automatically, which makes it much easier to have meaningful dialogs around here. (And am I the only person who cannot seem to get used to that ‘b’ after the ‘su’ in ‘subscribe’?!?)
  • Links: still need to add my last load of bookmarks. But I very regularly add to the link roll. You might have noticed that, out of religious beliefs, I hardly ever post entries only to point at something else (especially if something else is some random bit of Intarweb oddities that’s been posted about on 2000 other websites already), but it doesn’t mean I don’t have many cool links I like to share with you my belov’d readers. That’s what that Link menu above is for.
  • Alternate Language content: if you are curious to see how my brilliant writ translates into Japanese, German, Inuit or even French, I occasionally do post alternate versions which are only viewable (for technical reason) through the web interface… I’ll try to fix this to show in the RSS feed one day.
  • Meticulously organized archives: by date, by categories, by important topics (a list of dedicated static pages will soon appear above: give it a day or two).
  • And Most Importantly… Ageless pearls of wisdom: randomly picked from a vast collection and displayed in the header above. Consider making each one a guiding principle for your day (except perhaps the one that involves gerbils, duct tape and industrial strength vaseline).

I think that’s it for now (don’t you love blog entries that only talk about blogging).

P.S.: To all the masters of the backhanded compliment, you go and tell me in what freaking way this new design is any similar to Michael Heileman’s Kubrick… Sure I worked from his template in order to ensure I was perfectly code-compatible with the latest version of WordPress, seeing how it is the default WP 1.5 layout… But save for the most meaningless of CSS markups (not gonna try to reinvent the wheel by trying to pick another of the three other fonts available for web page, that probably wouldn’t even display on half the systems), it’s been majorly overhauled layout-wise, and completely redone, code-wise (I had my own needs).

Seriously, get real people: he didn’t invent drop shadows or grey side backgrounds. Neither did I. And I’m surely not gonna drop round corners on my entries because Kubrick happens to use them every-freakin-where… That being said, Kubrick is a mighty nice template (even if its css is hell to work with, and the utlra-broken-down file templating a big pain in the ass), not its fault if it’s now played out to the point of nausea on all corners of the web.

PPS: For those of you crazy enough to prefer the old layout, there’s a switch (that uses cookies to remember your choice between visits) in the More menu above.

As usual, mad props, marriage proposals and constructive criticisms are most welcome (especially the former).

Filed under: Meta

3 comments

  1. So Dave, do you want to marry me so we can enjoy life, cosplay and code php all our happy life toeget^M#@!… really nice design. The semi transparent menu (works only on real browsers) is really amazing.

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