David Emery Online

Hi there, I’m David. This is my website. I work in music for Apple. You can find out a bit more about me here. On occasion I’ve been known to write a thing or two. Please drop me a line and say hello. Views mine not my employers.

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What's black, white and red all over?

25 July 2006

Welcome to version 2 of my blog – I hope you like it!

I’ve been trying to get this out the door for a while now, so I’m really glad of finally done it. Their are all sorts of improvements (small ones, mostly) that I’ve been dying to do for ages, so here’s a quick list of the highlights:

  1. I think most importantly, I’ve finally made the jump to a fluid width design. I was feeling increasingly hypocritical talking about how bad fixed width sites were with my old design, so now I can start feeling all self important again. This design also uses a touch of javascript to make the large images fluid as well (dynamically loading larger and smaller images as appropriate).
  2. I’ve moved the blog up a directory, so that it sits at the root of the site. The site had essentially become just the blog for quite a while, so it seemed odd to keep it tucked away in a sub directory. I’ve set up a raft of redirect rules so that (hopefully) nothing should break (let me know if it does).
  3. Now that I’m a lot more efficient with Textpattern, I’ve tidied up the comments section. Before it was just the default layout (tables and all), but hopefully now it looks a bit nicer, and has nicer markup to boot.
  4. I’ve also added in a sidebar, for 2 reasons: 1) A fluid width site really needs a sidebar otherwise the main body text starts getting really wide quite quickly and 2) When I’m not on holiday, I post a lot (every weekday) so posts disappear down quite quickly. Hopefully this will promote them for a bit longer.

In the above image you can see the design progression I made when designing the site. I was originally going to try experimenting with having a static navigation bar dead centre, but I couldn’t figure out a way of making it work well. After abandoning it, I quickly moved to a more traditional, “newspaper” influenced design.

And then I made it red.

As you can see I was gunning for a grey look with accents of colour originally, but as time passed after the original designs were done more and more grey sites appeared, so I decided to go for a slightly more controversial colour scheme.

I like it, but I’m sure some won’t.

But that’s their problem.

From: Articles

25 July 2006