A Few Little Tweaks

As you may be able to see, I’ve tweaked the way this site looks a little bit. If everything looks peculiar, you might want to load and refresh this mess of a stylesheet.

I hadn’t looked at the templates and stylesheet for this place in an age, and they are spectacularly messy, often to the point of being nonsensical to my eyes (and I wrote them).

The tweaks might not look too fabulous to PC users, and since my hooky copy of Virtual PC has now given up the ghost completely I can’t check - one thing’s for sure, when I wrote the CSS that takes care of positioning elements on the page, I really had not grasped the complexities of the box model, and the way different browsers interpret it.

Those problems won’t be fixed tonight, but, as far as I can see, only users of older versions of Internet Explorer - hello Dad! - should be seeing serious glitches. If there are glaring horrors, please leave a comment.

(I say ‘only’, but you people made up 42% of visitors to the site last month, so I will fix this as soon as possible.)

Oh, and in case you’re struggling to see any differences at all: all the text is nice and big, the headers are now set to Arial Rounded MT Bold, and the body text to Lucida Grande. If you don’t have these installed, or the alternative Lucida Sans Unicode, then everything will remain set in Verdana (which I had rather tired of). I also ditched the ugly main header, with it’s outmoded image replacement technique, tidied up the leading a bit in a bid to improve readability, removed a couple of borders and ditched the right-aligned date headers (which only served to emphasise how infrequently we post here at times). Oh, and I think I did something to the way links are displayed, but I can’t remember what. Thanks to the wonders of CSS, all that took about five minutes.

Needless to say, the above changes are a small move toward my oft-repeated design goal for this site: to make it look even more like ‘a fucking till receipt’ (© Hannah McGill).

Posted at 8pm on 18/03/04 by Jack Mottram to the site news category.
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Tags: design, meta