Version 9

8 February 2010

Regular readers will know that I have a – how shall I put it? – tendency to redesign this site at the drop of a hat. So much so that the assorted different versions got featured in a presentation at SXSW last year.

So, with that in mind welcome to version 9 of de-online.co.uk!

It’s actually been over a year since the last version was launched, and although I did tweak that a little as the year progressed that’s the largest amount of time between different version since I launched this little corner of the internet. This version, it has to be said, is not a huge departure from the previous one and carries a few of the themes developed there forward; the large photo headers, the colour red for links and highlights and a similar main typeface choice.

Last time round that typeface was Trade Gothic, with Helvetica used for body text, but that involved using Sifr (flash-based text replacement) which I was never happy with. This time round of embraced the wonders of @fontface and used two freely available fonts in the form of League Gothic for headings, and Steinem for body text, both of which I think look lovely; it’s nice to be able to get away from the standard font choices for once!

Let’s see – what else is new?

I guess the main layout change is the introduction of the sidebar. I’d been thinking for a while that it was probably harder then it should be to see the most recent blog posts and that bringing in photos and twitter updates would be nice as well; that’s pretty much what sidebars are for, right? I’ve also added in a ‘Music’ section – ideally this would be automatically powered by Last.fm but I couldn’t be bothered to actually make that work (a project for another day) so for now it’s a manually updated list of what I’m listening to at the moment.

The whole thing is packed full of CSS3 type goodies, although not as many -webkit-transition’s as I’d like as Webkit these days seems to have all sorts of rendering glitches when using them (dear Webkit team – please fix this!). I’ve also managed to remove a bunch of javascript that used to be used to scale the top header image – now most of that is done using the new background-size property which scales backgrounds to fit.

I’ve no idea what it looks like in any flavour of IE – probably a bit rubbish to be honest, and I’ll fix it at some point I guess.

Anyway; I hope you like it – it probably could be better, but it’ll do for now…

From: Articles

8 February 2010