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Tue, 31 May 2005

New Theme

/meta/ @ 23:49 on Tue, 2005-05-31

I've got a new site theme. I got tired of the old clashing blue-and-brown and decided to make it a bit lighter. I think this better represents me as I am now: bolder, a bit more refined, and a bit more cheerful. It's still lacking a certain something, but I don't know what just yet. Perhaps another color to compliment all the blue.

Additionally, I wanted to try out a new technique for theming the site: I have basic XHTML documents that live on the server and are transformed using AXKit and an XSLT stylesheet to add in the necessary content for navigation bars and hooks for the CSS. Then I've got CSS for all the actual themey bits. This should give me much more flexibility in content creation. I don't need any hooks whatsoever in the XHTML documents now (before, I used server-side includes to add in navigation) and can mungle/merge content. This makes things like my new javascript color clock work in the theme, as well as stand-alone without any extra effort.

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Comments

Re: New Theme

Apreche @ Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:39

The text is hard to read because it is gray on blue. Seems quite buggy on firefox/windows on my work laptop. The navigation thing is floating around where it is hard to click.

Glad you got a new theme though. Honestly, the old one was really kind of ugly, totally 1996 style.

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Re: New Theme

Xavier @ Wed, 01 Jun 2005 00:53

Woah. I totally didn't notice that bug. Um, I'll be fixin' that up tomorrow for sure.

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Re: New Theme

Ed @ Wed, 01 Jun 2005 06:42

Gah, contrast! Can't read!

...by which I mean, what-Apreche-said.

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Re: New Theme

Xavier @ Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:03

Ok, so rudimentary fixes are in place. Still a bit more to do.

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Ed @ Mon, 06 Jun 2005 11:56

Yay!

I continue to be very amused by your spambot-protection. :)

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Re: New Theme

Apreche @ Thu, 02 Jun 2005 10:05

ahhhh, this is much more excellent. Great job.

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Re: New Theme

care @ Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:52

one question: why not make the XXV watermark stick, too, like the nav does?

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Re: New Theme

care @ Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:57

also: you know text, graphics, and photo give 404s, and text and graphics do so in the old style? oh, also, now that I look, your nav bar isn't persistent, the categories change...

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Re:

Xavier @ Tue, 21 Jun 2005 23:34

Uh, yeah. BFG's down. Not much I can do about it until we get a new hard drive.

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Re: New Theme

Susannah @ Fri, 08 Jul 2005 11:11

The new theme looks very nice. You probably know this already, but the javascript color clock doesn't seem to do anything besides produce a button labeled 'full screen' in Firefox (1.0.4) with javascript support turned on under Mac OS X. And yes, your spam prevention is incredibly cute.

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Re: New Theme

Susannah @ Fri, 08 Jul 2005 11:13

Oops, didn't realize that the default URL was a mailto.

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Painful on Firefox w/ OS X

Bob Aman @ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 16:15

Firefox for Mac is slow. 'Tis a fact. But Firefox for Mac on this site is downright painful. Scrolling is quite a task.

Just fyi.

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Re: Painful on Firefox w/ OS X

Steve Pomeroy @ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 18:14

Hm, I bet it is. This is probably due to all the alpha transparency. You should be able to turn off the theme with Firefox. Just do View → Page Style → No Style. I should make a "lite" style for it.

Perhaps you may want to try lynx? It works fine in that ;-)

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