All 13 entries tagged Wb-Css

Favourites

There's little that can be changed about the overall layout of the favourites page without a major rethink. But i'm going through trying to clean up (and validate) as much of the markup as possible, i've also stripped out all the colour formatting from the main template (ie the coloured headers at the top of the columns) so now each blog theme can more easily customise this page, like so:

I'm in two minds about whether to keep the heart or just remove it altogether…

: 19 Aug 2005 02:16 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (18) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Progress

All existing themes and two new ones are now at least usable in the new layout markup.

Just to do the same for favourites and profiles (shouldn't take as long) and I should be able to send off some files for (hopefully) deployment.

I'm fairly sure they all appear the same in IE5+, Firefox, Opera7+ and i'm guessing Safari.

: 18 Aug 2005 18:07 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Swirly

The first step in naming a blog style after it's tiled background image, is to make sure the background image actually tiles.

RIP Swirly.

Note: I haven't really killed Swirly, but there's little chance of getting it looking the same as before without using the opacity filters again

: 18 Aug 2005 17:59 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Black2: Not So Black

Here it is, because Sam requested it repeatedly and because I feel it has a nice minimalist appearance.

It's Black2, the ironic thing is that it's actually a very dark grey and not black at all.

: 16 Aug 2005 01:07 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

More Puce

Been playing around with this a bit more and made two options. Option A is a continuation on the previous, Option B is less in your face but the logical flow of viewing seems to fall on the sidebar rather than the content (ie bad design). I'm inlined to go with Option A but see what I can do about making it a little less bright at the top without losing the reds.

Here they are anyway:

Option A

Option B

I suppose I could make the body text slightly brighter (not white though) to draw the eye to that area of the page…

: 12 Aug 2005 02:31 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (12) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Puce

Design idea, there's something not quite right but i'm not sure what. Any thoughts? I'm just thinking about the balance of colour as a whole really, there's something missing.

: 11 Aug 2005 16:09 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (15) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

So what is this new layout thing anyway?

In the past few entries i've mentioned a new layout for the blogs. Don't worry, the overall appearance hasn't changed, it's just the building block in making the page which have been modified.

Major Changes:

• Drop-down menu now works in Opera
• Images can now be floated left in entries without dropping down into the entry below
• Wide content won't cause the entries container to drop below the sidebar in IE, the page will get a horizontal scrollbar in all browsers now (might overflow the page design but won't break the layout)
• The blog entries now come before the sidebar in the markup, this is better for accessibility and search engines
• Some unnecessary block-level elements have been removed, others introduced to make styling more versatile

Current Issues:

• If the sidebar is longer than the content it looks bad on some designs, it's unavoidable but a clever little javascript hides the worst of it
• I've been removing the opacity (translucency) effect to make designs look the same in all browsers, i've managed to use a clever faux translucency trick to make some layouts look pretty much as they used to (they now look right in IE), the Swirly style is a bit more complex so requires more thinking.

: 10 Aug 2005 14:27 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Swift1

I actually made this months ago, but now i've got down to the S's in tweaking the designs to work with the new markup i've had a chance to get it working again.

In many ways it's the only theme that's actually fully working, all the others still need a lot of work.

Once i've finished getting all the designs working layout-wise i have to go through them all again to make sure all the colours are correct (a lot of the link colours are a bit messed up for some reason) and that they all work with the favourites and profile markup. Then a few more tweaks and they're done. After that, new themes (ie Swift).

(A cookie for the first person to beat the number of times i've used the word "work" in this entry)

: 10 Aug 2005 00:22 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

glassdog

If anyone can think of a magical way to make glassdog look good, i'm eager to hear it. Otherwise it's getting a major refit/delete/whatever.

Is it possible to get stats of how much each blog theme is in use? May as well start with the unpopular ones.

: 07 Aug 2005 00:56 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Problem Designs

These are all the designs that fall apart if the sidebar is longer than the content when using absolute positioning:

• christmas_blue
• christmas_green
• fruity
• funky
• glassdog
• greenmorris
• icywow
• leaf
• morris
• orangecheck
• redbrown
• coolblue2

I have a javascript hack that can make most of them work ok, but it will stop working if the text-size is dynamically increased (using the browser) after the page has been loaded.

This problem will most likely be seen:

• when viewing a single short blog entry without many comments
• if the blog owner has a very large number of favourites
• on the favourites page if the entries haven't been expanded

There might be a way to tweak the designs so that even if they have this problem they degrade gracefully.

Update: May have thought of a none javascript solution whilst in the shower, i'm so clever. It requires a tiny amount of extra markup and extra css rules, and i haven't tested it yet, but i can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work. It should stop sidebar overflowing beyond the central background (won't stop it overflowing past the drop shadows though, it may be easier just to remove those).

Update: It works in Firefox, Not IE. Kind of useless since if I ignore IE I can make any design work in a matter of minutes

Update: I've tried to see if there's a way to make it work in IE but not Firefox (so I can use hacks later), but no luck. That's enough time spent on this particular problem, I guess it's time to look at some way of changing the designs. This is kind of annoying because a lot of the designs I was keen on doing aren't possible

: 04 Aug 2005 14:36 |  Tags: Wb-Css |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem