Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Notes on the New Design

For the curi­ous few: a smat­ter­ing of detail on what went into this new theme.

For one reason or another I decided that I wanted to cre­ate a theme that emu­lated a news­pa­per lay­out (a small one, gran­ted). That called for a colum­nar lay­out — not the most straight­for­ward thing to achieve in HTML. Support does exist in CSS3, but it’s not per­vas­ive enough for me to be com­pletely com­fort­able using it, and I didn’t feel con­vinced it would give me the con­trol I wanted. I ended up with a cus­tom solu­tion that works well for mul­tiple posts but struggles a bit when dis­trib­ut­ing a single post across mul­tiple columns — I’d like to think it copes in most situ­ations, however.

Posts are flagged to con­trol how they’re dis­played — namely whether or not they should occupy the “top spot” at the top of the page where they’re shown in full, over three columns. Older posts then fol­low below, with the lead­ing couple of para­graphs dis­played before a “more” link to con­tinue reading.

I also added a “pop­u­lar posts” col­lec­tion below the page head­ing — posts can be tagged to appear in this list, which is designed to pro­mote par­tic­u­lar bits of con­tent to readers.

A first for me in this pro­ject was the use of @font-face to include non-standard fonts. Thanks to the fant­astic col­lec­tion over at FontSquirrel, I had a huge vari­ety of commercially-licensed free fonts to choose from, and they even provide a @font-face kit gen­er­ator to ease the inclu­sion pro­cess. The site title graphic is set in League Gothic, with the sub­title in Silkscreen (another great free­bie); the menu and post head­ings are set in Museo. Lastly, the splat­ter graph­ics are glyphs from the WC Rhesus fam­ily, another great free typeface.

What’s miss­ing from the old theme? A few bits and pieces — I’m try­ing to stream­line things. Comments/registration aren’t cur­rently avail­able, and I’m tak­ing a bit of a time-out to decide whether I want to rein­state them or not.

The archives have been vastly sim­pli­fied, and for the time being cat­egor­ies aren’t in use either — I’m not sure they ever really added any value.

I’m also using a hand­ful of neat WordPress plu­gins which I’ll talk about in a future post. Did I men­tion this blog was powered by WordPress? I prob­ably should do. It’s 100% super; you should use it too. You do already? Awesome. We should swap links.

I call this new theme Handbill. It’s not cur­rently released pub­licly — I ima­gine it will get there at some point — but in the mean­time if you’d like to have a look at its innards or make use of it in your own pro­ject (or you just want to tell me how much you love/hate it), get in touch.