Redesign 3: Hazy Morning

September 8, 2004 in Uncategorized | 7 comments

As you may have noticed (unless you use a feed reader or are reading this some time in the future), I’ve finally gotten round to doing a redesign of Solitude. This, the 4th full design since I started the site, is called Hazy Morning.

It seems like I’m in fine company when it comes to redesigns, given recent or in progress changes by Chris, Matt, Fiona, Jack Mottram, Drew Mclellan, Mozilla et al.

Anyway, onto dissecting the trickier parts of the design.

The header uses standard image replacement techniques and some CSS hacking to produce a full-length clickable region. It was more trick than it should be to get this working cross-platform. Much respect has to go towards the CSS Underscore Hack, the most elegant bug fix for IE that I’ve yet to see. Very nice.

Equally getting the individual post headings to be fully targetable was awkward. The key to getting it to work is to make the surrounding block be set to display: inline; and the heading itself to display: block;, and then set the width of both to 99.9%.

Other than that, it was really a matter of tweaking as much as possible to get it to look alright in IE. It still doesn’t look perfect in that browser but I’ve spent enough time catering to a broken application.

If you see any problems in your browser, leave a comment with details of the bug and your platform, browser and resolution. I’ll be tweaking over the next few days anyway, but it’s good to get feedback.

  1. Matt Gemmell’s avatar

    Matt Gemmell on September 8, 2004 at 11:25 pm

    Looks a million times better, dude. Nice work.

  3. Derek Murray’s avatar

    Derek Murray on September 10, 2004 at 1:45 pm

    A very pleasant redesign indeed – and it should silence Mark :P. Ever looking for the next version, however, it’d be spiffy if you were to implement TrackBack, so we can share the linky love.

    I seem to recall that it doesn’t take long (if you use a library), and I may or may not have implemented it myself in an evening whilst drunk.

    Cheers,

    Derek.

  4. Gary Fleming’s avatar

    Gary Fleming on September 10, 2004 at 4:14 pm

    Derek: we all know how much of an uber-coder you are when drunk, so shush. To be honest, I’ve got a tonne of stuff I want to add into Finetto (my CMS) but I’m never going to get round to it because the underlying architecture needs rewritten.

    A switch to WordPress might be happening soon.

  5. Matt Gemmell’s avatar

    Matt Gemmell on September 11, 2004 at 2:20 pm

    WordPress indeed? Shtunning.

    Shouldn’t you change your favicon too, to match the new design? Maybe I just still have the old black/white/red one cached here.

  6. Jeiel Aranal’s avatar

    Jeiel Aranal on September 16, 2004 at 2:10 pm

    Sweet redesign, although the alignment of the text to the right kinda throws me off. Having a large amount of whitespace to the left is a bit disconcerting.

  7. Gary Fleming’s avatar

    Gary Fleming on September 16, 2004 at 7:34 pm

    Well, as much as I like the huge amounts of whitespace, the main text will be getting shunted over a bit soon. I knew I was pushing the comfortable reading size a bit anyway (well, by 10-20 characters per line). It shall be fixed.