Itchy

7 February 2008

So you now know why I’ve haven’t been posting much; the redesign bug hit (yet) again, and it really took hold this time. This is the 11th iteration of this site, and the second in about 6 months which is a pretty high turnover even for my standards. I really wanted to get this design out there, though – it’s probably the thing I’ve been happiest with for quite a while.

The most obvious feature to highlight are the changing background images. Each post now has two images: the existing wide screen image, and a larger photo background that accompanies it wherever you see it (RSS readers: take a look at the home page and scroll about). This was born out of the realisation that due to project365 I’ve now got loads of photos to choose from on any given day, so I can now quite easily showcase large images. I’ve also elected to cast aside anyone on a slow connection – all the large images are loaded asynchronously via javascript, but its still a big page to load.

The other thing that you may well have not noticed is it’s enhanced for Safari 3 (and 3.1, which I’ll get onto in a minute). As Safari 3 supports a whole load of useful CSS 3 I’ve decided instead of messing around trying to do fancy things with layered PNGs and the like I’d just optimise for anything that can handle box shadows, text-shadows and RBGA (RGB with an alpha value) colours. It still looks nice in Firefox – I don’t think you’d ever know if you didn’t compare it. I haven’t looked at it in IE yet, but it’s going to get a reduced experience.

Now, what’s even more fun is taking advantage of the forthcoming Safari 3.1 release, which supports CSS animation. So, if you look at the site in Safari 3 all sorts of bits fade in and out on roll over, and the sidebar does some fun sliding things. It was amazingly easy to implement some very impressive touches – I really hope that the other browser makers get on board with this. If you want to have a play you can download a WebKit nightly build.

Right. Must try and keep this design up for a little longer then last time…

From: Articles

7 February 2008