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