Restylin’
Those of you who actually go to this website directly rather than just reading the Atom feed — both of you — will likely notice that something’s changed today. Last night, I decided to do a from-scratch stylesheet rewrite, replacing the six-year-old design I had with something much simpler.
The main change this time round is that I’ve paid a lot more attention to the typography, and so (hopefully) the content is now a lot more readable than it was — something that I was never really happy with before. There’s still more to do (areas that I know are suboptimal: the archive page and images), but this seems like a reasonable place to start.
While this is mostly a CSS change, I did also take the opportunity to simplify some of the HTML, and to remove some of the ‘cute’ — but ultimately useless — features such as the ‘Posted 5 days ago’ humanised timestamps (which were produced using hacky client-size JavaScript).
Finally, I’ve added an ad slot at the bottom of the content. This isn’t because I’m looking to make money from this site — probably for the best, given how few people read this — but rather because I’ve recently moved to the AdSense team, and it’s useful to have an account to play around with.
Bonus fantastic facts:
When I originally put together the design in 2006/7, I had to do extensive cross-checking between Firefox 2 and IE6 to make sure that things didn’t fall apart. This time, I just wrote the CSS that I expected to, and double-checked it worked in Chrome. The simpler design helped, but so did much-improved browser interoperability. (That said, please do let me know if anything is grossly broken on your favourite browser.)
The “cloud and tree” banner I used in the old design (derived from a CC-licensed photo on Flickr that’s sadly since been removed) was a reference to this blog’s original title, “Cloud and wind-blown tree”, which was itself taken from an ancient post about HTML semantics by Ian Hickson. The title lasted about a week before I decided that it was far too obscure, but the banner stuck around.