I’ve split this site into two, a personal one and a professional one. Spaceninja.com will remain my professional blog, with an emphasis on front-end web production. I’ve set up a new blog on ScottVandehey.com that I will be using for more personal posts about Zoe and non-web-development topics. Thanks for your patience.
Over the weekend, I upgraded the theme for Space Ninja. Firstly, I changed the header and footer color scheme and pattern for the holidays. I think it’s nice, and the little sprig of mistletoe over the logo cracks me up.
Secondly, I upgraded the site to “widescreen” format – which really just means that I’m targeting 1024px screen resolutions instead of 800px. Now that 95% of the viewing population is on the larger screen, I can upgrade to two sidebars, which is good, since it was getting pretty lengthy with just the one. Now the delicious links are near the top, but don’t interfere with the blog functionality like recent comments.
The other cool thing that widescreen format gives me is the ability to post larger photos. The previous design only let me post 450px wide photos, which causes problems for me, since flickr only offers photos at 500px and 250px. This new design is specifically formatted for 500px wide photos, which means that I should be able to post more photos in the future, and will make life easier once Zoe is born.
Speaking of Zoe, you’ll notice that there’s (still) no mention of her in the redesign. That’s coming soon, too. In the meantime, if you’re looking for baby information, head over to baby.spaceninja.com, where you’ll find my information program running. Annie’s convinced the math I’m using is faulty, so that will be revisited soon, as well as adding other content to the page.
Not many changes under the hood other than that, though. I did some minor cleanup in the markup and CSS, but left things largely intact, since this upgrade was focused on widescreen. I may revisit this at some point, though, and get the code a little neater.
If you’re using IE6, it probably looks horrible. I haven’t had a chance to test for it yet, since I’m running IE7 at home, and haven’t installed the VirtualPC image yet. Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll get IE6 compatibility working, but in the meantime, I’ll just encourage you to check out the site in Firefox or IE7.
Welcome spaceninja.org to the fold! Together with spaceninja.net and spaceninja.com, this completes the holy trinity of the spaceninja domain! I toyed with the idea of buying the .info and .mobi domains also, but then decided that I don’t care.
Of course, that’s what I originally thought about spaceninja.org, and a few years later when someone had bought it, I was kicking myself for that decision…
The new design got linked at two of the CSS gallery sites! I got a “Notable Entry” link on the sidebar at CSSImport.com, and a full-screen page over at Screenspire.com. Hooray! Thanks for the links!
Work is continuing on the new design for the blog. I’ve moved on from thumbnailing to making mockups in Photoshop. I had a few false starts, and entertained a few odd ideas at first, but I soon got my focus back and worked hard at producing the mockup based on the final thumbnail I chose. Oddly, while my thumbnail was very helpful at getting sizes and layout down, I hadn’t put much thought into uses of color, beyond that I wanted to use more color than normal. In the end, my color choice was dictated by the photo in my header graphic, and I’m planning on setting it up so that I can easily slap up a new header graphic and adjust the colors on the rest of the design to match, which would let me do special designs or seasonal colors if I wanted to.
I also found myself debating about what size to make the design. I spent quite awhile looking at other blogs, evaluating whether or not I liked how their design filled the browser window. What I discovered is that while it’s quite trendy right now to design for 1024px screens and set the design up to cut off gracefully on an 800px screen (or not), I don’t think it’ll work for me. It’s great for guys like A List Apart, who have an abundance of content that all needs to fit on the front page, but my personal site doesn’t really need that. I would prefer that the design follow function in this case, so I’m sticking to 750px width. That’s actually a step up from the current design, but I’ve already used this width on Sean’s blog, and I like the extra breathing room it gives, especially in the sidebar.
I’m pushing myself right now to finish the design in time to submit my site for round 3 of admissions to the 9rules network. It will definitely be a big task to get everything done in time, especially since this weekend Annie and I are watching our friends’ kids so they can go on a date. Wish me luck!