So you may have noticed the new template. What you may not know is that the changes are more than skin-deep: I’ve rewritten the template from the ground up to take advantage of all the latest CSS3/HTML5 bells and whistles, including my new favorite thing, Compass.
The site is now responsive: you should be able to look at it on everything from an iPhone to a desktop and the layout should gracefully change to accommodate the screen size (if you notice any wrinkles, please do let me know).
Finally, the site design makes use of a series of best practices that my colleagues and I have been compiling over the years, which has culminated in an open source project we call our CSS3 Foundation.
Take a look and let me know what you think!
Speaking of good web fonts, my new theme (troublesome thing) has lots of C-font goodness going on. Here’s what I’m using:
- Charis SIL for the heading and body text, with Calluna (using TypeKit) as a fallback.
- Calibri with Helvetica as a fallback for the buttons and date text (oh, if only CSS would allow you to use
text-transform on numerals as well as letters).
I’ve also significantly increased the base font size and obsessively adjusted the spacing for improved readability and cleanliness. The post footers have shed some unwelcome weight—Does anyone really care whether the links at the bottom are tags or categories? I didn’t think so.—and are now enjoying a more svelte, more elegant appearance. You can tell me if you feel there’s been an improvement; for my part, I’m feeling pretty good about it.
Man, the problems just kept coming. Well, to be honest, this one had been around for a while; the search function was going to the wrong URL, but that’s now fixed. Sorry ’bout that.
Phew, got it fixed. Turned out to be a problem in the code I’d been using to add my custom post types to the site’s main RSS feed. Should be fixed now. Please do let me know (at the email address at the bottom of the page) if you have any further issues.
Thanks for your patience (if you were waiting) and sorry for the inconvenience.
So you’ve no doubt noticed the lovely ostentatious error message at the top of the page by now, and noticed that none of the single post pages seem to be working. I think this is an error (or errors) in my template code, and I’m working on tracking it down now. I’ll post back when I’ve fixed it.
I apologize for any inconvenience you experience.
It’s done. I’ve combined all my old sites into one, and shut down the now-extraneous ones (sniffle). Picture me dusting off my hands, pulling off my bandana, and surveying my newly clean electronic house in satisfaction. You should now see a proliferation of new categories in the pulldown in the footer, containing all my writings about anime, books and music.
I ended up scrapping the review-as-custom-post-type idea, since the review was so similar to the regular post as not to add much value. I just went through and made sure to tag and categorize all the reviews consistently, so you’ll still be able to browse them by category and star rating.
Now the one thing I can’t figure out is that some of the categories (the imported ones) don’t use a slug when you go to their category pages, they use the category ID. Hmm. Well, at least you can find everything pretty easily. I’ll figure it out sooner or later.
(I don’t know if anyone but me will, but: )Enjoy!
Faithful readers (all two of you) will know that I haven’t been updating my site with great regularity in the past months, but that’s all going to change soon.
With the recent release of WordPress 3.0, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with the new custom post types feature, and I’ve gotta say that I’m pretty excited about it.
For those who want to use WP as a GUI to create arbitrary objects, tables and URLs in a relational manner—as you would with a web application framework like Rails or Django—you’re still better off using something like Pods CMS. However, in case that you want to use WP more like a traditional CMS, where the primary content still consists of text-based posts, WP 3.0 is the answer for your needs.
In the coming weeks, I plan to overhaul my web presence:
- I’m consolidating all my 5 sites into 1 (this one, since it’s the most actively read and maintained).
- Part of that consolidation will be putting together all the reviews I write (books, music, movies, software) in a single, cohesive format (read: custom post type) that will make them easier to find and browse. That is, depending upon whether I can find some way to batch-convert existing posts into the new post type.
- I’m also going to introduce a lighter form of post, in the tradition of Tumblr and Daring Fireball. These tumbles will be interspersed with my regular posts, and will hopefully make it easier for me to share links and easier for you to browse to them—by clicking on the title rather than hunting around inside the post to find them. You can see an example of my first tumble below (Aaaaarrrgggggghhhhh!), where you’ll notice a (this is the technical term) tumble-y icon off to the right, that will provide the permalink for easier, er, re-tumbling.
Today is the 5-year anniversary of the day I started blogging. Woo!
I thought about doing a retrospective, or linking to interesting posts, but I’m too lazy. I figure you can navigate around just fine all by yourself, so have at it if you so desire.
In other news, here are some cool things I saw recently:
- Typedia is a new site like Wikipedia, for type. To get started, check out this article (with pictures!) about the anatomy of a typeface. Now you, too, will be able to tell a finial from a terminal, or a bowl from a counter.
- Type Daily is an aggregator of type-related content from across the web, brought to us by iLT. Super terrific!
I’d been using the same basic layout for quite a while with little modification, so I thought I’d change it up and take the opportunity to remove as much cruft as I could from the sidebar. The leaner, hungrier sidebar now only has the stuff that’s actually useful to most users (I think).
Less important browsing information like archives, categories and tags has now been moved into the expanded footer.
For those who are curious, the masthead font (and the heading and date font, if you happen to have it installed) is Sentinel (semibold italic in the former).
The color scheme was generated using the aid of Adobe’s neat-o kuler site—check out my public schemes. Note that Flash Player 10 is required.
an advance birthday present to myself—I gave in and bought Archer, and then on that flimsy pretext redesigned this site’s template to use it. You’ll notice Archer being used in the heading graphic, and, if you have it installed, the headings and date badges.
I also took the opportunity to reduce the size of the excessively large header graphic and severely pared down the rest of the design to remove static and generally clean up the layout.