Gabe Harris

Times are changing

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

And so is my site. Don’t try to use the contact form in the footer yet, it won’t get you anywhere. The contact form should work now! I’m using some CSS3 and HTML5, and WordPress (still), and jQuery (still), and the 960 Grid System. I have also drastically simplified the site, and cut out a lot of garbage. Most of the garbage is still available if you dig around, it’s just not blasted in your face like it was before. I got tired of all the nonsense I see all over so many sites, I really wanted to let content be the focus of the new design. Additionally I decided that font-replacement JavaScript is trash, so I’m using the @font-face technique. And I have completely abandoned trying to make the site look the same in all browsers. I have a script that should do some magic if you’re running an older version of IE (but I’m not checking what it actually does), the site is really designed for Chrome or Firefox (I’m guessing Safari looks similar to Chrome.)

BTW, if you want to “social bookmark” anything, you know how to do it, I’m not putting 497 icons all over the place to do it for you.

I like the new design, I was looking for something more “serious” feeling (maybe an effect of the 73 feet of snow we got this winter?)

Also left to do is to make some sense of a mobile version of the site. I haven’t looked at it on a mobile browser yet, but I’m guessing it could use some help.

I hope you enjoy the new site!

• tagged: clean, dark, new site, redesign
• categorized: blogging, css, design, personal, site
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CSS Organization

Monday, April 6th, 2009

There comes a time, unfortunately, when the web site is built. It has been completed and the client/manager/boss has signed off on it. This feels like the end of a long arduous journey that has lead through the depths of your soul as a developer. It’s done. Completed. Finished. Right? Not so fast! The journey is not nearly complete, it is so very, very, VERY far from over. Now comes the maintenance, upkeep, management of the site. How can we make this part of the life cycle less painful? Proper prior preparation prevents poor performance.

One area that can cause plenty of angst is the site’s style sheet(s). Riddled throughout the site’s code are all these tags for class=”" and id=”". What can we do to make these more manageable? How do I find what I’m looking for once I open that .css file, scroll to the bottom and learn that it is 400+ lines of code? This article addresses some ideas for organizing CSS files.

Keep reading…

• tagged: clean, coding, maintenance, organization
• categorized: css, development
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