latest posts relevant to ‘sitenews’

so on top of everything else going on in my life, i got the itch to redesign my blog. it’s been a while. the new design is something i’ve had rattling around in my brain for a while, and i finally took a bit of time to bring it all together.

this is the eighth design iteration for my website, starting from it’s humble beginnings in 1996.

i had originally intended to design my own paisley for the background. paisleys are something i’ve been obsessed with for a number of years as well (the things you’re learning about me!). but i’ve found that while i think i’m a pretty competent developer, and and adequate designer, i would rank ‘illustrator’ even lower on my list of attributes than ‘writer.’ so, i found and licensed the paisley pattern on istockphoto.com.

it’s a subtle effect, but in browsers other than Internet Explorer 6, on top of the paisleys are a shadow and a highlight that stay fixed when you scroll the page (although the paisley and the content move).

not that i’m dropping support for IE6, but i wanted to take advantage of functionality available in modern browsers. you should still get proper layout and usability in IE6, and something special if you’re using something newer.

thanks for reading, and you can give me feedback (constructive, please!) in the comments or use the contact form to send me a private note.

for about a decade now, mikeyboy.com has been a solo blog. just me, blathering about just what i’m thinking about, sporadically.

that doesn’t really reflect who i am though, or my life and what affects me. for the past eight years, someone has been by my side for this crazy ride we call ‘life.’ and since her blog has become focused on taxes and business, she’s needed an outlet to post about what goes on in our lives outside of work*.

so with much further ado, i present to you: the Mrs. welcome, carrie, to mikeyboy.com!

(*or maybe she just got tired of how infrequently i update)

just a quick site news update – had to remove the Twitter Tools widget from the utility column. Twitter is having issues (again) and the plugin i was using to retrieve my latest tweets was not written to handle Twitter being unavailable.

it may return in the future, but breath holding is not recommended.

not earth-shattering developments, but i’ve made a few updates to my site theme that may or may not be interesting, depending on whether you are a geek or not. in no particular order, the changes include:

• the site name is larger, and the byline is moved to the right of it
• the main page width scales with your browser window width, but will have a minimum and maximum width if your window gets too small or too large (except Internet Explorer 6 users – you get a fixed width page. please upgrade)
• there is a very subtle, dotted separator line delineating the flickr images on the left, from the content column in the center, from the utility column on the right
• not only do the columns scale with browser width, but the whitespace between them scales, and keeps the separator line centered between the columns
• the header and columns now are more rigidly aligned in a grid
• the utility column on the right scales up to be wider than it used to be, yet scales down smaller than it used to
• the content column, and parts of the utility column, are now text-justified so they fill squarely to the right margin
• i’ve added some simple logic to the flickr image display so it retrieves fewer images on article pages than it does on the homepage (the content of some articles is a lot shorter, and the images were pushing out the page height past the content length)

this revisit was inspired by attending An Event Apart Boston recently (writing a summary of AEA on my SQUAREDESIGN site). if you have any opinions, let me know.

i liked the old design okay. it was a quick new thing when i switched to wordpress.

this new design incorporates a 3 column layout, built with techniques i learned from this old school tutorial at glish.com.

the sidebar is different – i canned the archive links. who wants to read this by month? use the Search feature if you need to find something in particular.

also the banner graphic, while it overlapped the content area slightly, i thought it could be more prominent – yet, less distracting.

the font face is defaulted to Helvetica, and will degrade to Microsoft Sans Serif in the absense of Helvetica. if neither is found, your system’s default sans-serif font is loaded.

oops, i almost forgot to mention – the images on the left are the latest feed from my flickr photostream.

there are lots of other little tweaks to improve readability and usability. plus a few that might be functional or fun (doesn’t that first line of each paragraph look darker?) enjoy! feel free to comment if you have questions or concerns.