Beware of Squanda

July 25th, 2008

Today Paul Kim complimented my new blog design and I mentioned that I was thinking about replacing the bird at the top with a squirrel. A few minutes later, he sent me the new header above with what looks like a cross between a squirrel and a panda which he called a squanda.

I really like it. Thanks Paul!

Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , | Comments (2)

Blog Redesign

July 19th, 2008

I just finished a redesign of my blog and I’m pretty excited about it. I’d been using the previous theme for several years and felt it was time for something new. I’d also gotten a number of comments that the font was too small and hard to read on the previous theme. I decided to go with something the opposite of my previous dark theme and use a white background.

I found a great theme by Randa Clay that I ended up making a number of changes to — mostly with the width of the layout. I also redid my tags and categories and went through every post I’ve made and tagged it appropriately.

I added a favicon, rewrote my blog “pages”, and added my Twitter status to the sidebar. I’ll probably start blogging more often for a bit since I’m excited about it now.

Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: , | No Comments

Site Identity, Part 1

May 2nd, 2007

This week I decided I want to work on my site and extensions a bit before I live and breath Mozilla for the next 3 months. Enter the ribbon. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite awhile, and it took a bit longer than I expected.

I added what I’m calling a ribbon (unrelated to Office 2007) to the main fligtar.com sites, like this blog. Clicking on it will bring down a menu of other things on fligtar.com.

I wanted to be able to easily modify an existing site to use this style and I wanted to be able to modify the menu content in one place, but I didn’t want to use PHP.

I’m pretty happy with the result (I won’t say “Mission Accomplished”), as including the ribbon without gradient can be done by:

<html>
    <head>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://g.fligtar.com/ribbon.css" type="text/css">
        <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://g.fligtar.com/jquery.js"></script>
        <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://g.fligtar.com/ribbon.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="ribbon_menu" style="display: none;"></div>
        <div id="ribbon"><div id="ribbon_logo"></div></div>
    </body>
</html>

… and the gradient is 2 lines more.

The process I went through to create this reveals why it took longer than expected:

  1. Determine color scheme
  2. Make shiny bar
  3. Place shiny bar
  4. Make 4 versions of logo that I’m not happy with
  5. Make 2 entirely functional menus before deciding I want the ribbon to drop down
  6. Fight with IE
  7. Realize that some sites (blog and LSU map) can’t use the gradient
  8. Separate gradient from shiny bar and redo that area of CSS
  9. Deploy to all sites
  10. Fight with trac’s CSS which did not play nicely with mine
  11. Win!

I called this Part 1, but my current plan is basically:

  1. Implement Ribbon
  2. …
  3. Profit!
Categories: projects | Tags: , , , , , | Comments (2)