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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1308 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on September 8, 2005 and belongs in the site news category. The previous post was , and the next post is .

Approaching ‘Fucking Till Receipt’ Nirvana

Ah, that’s better.

The new design isn’t com­plete, but it’ll do for now. As long as you’re using Fire­fox or Safari.

As you can see, every­thing has been sim­pli­fied. The index page is pretty much the same as an indi­vid­ual post page, which seems to make sense as most people find the site via a search engine or by click­ing through from one of the var­i­ous feeds. At the top of each page is a nugget of useful infor­ma­tion, telling you where you are and, in most cases, sug­gest­ing where you might like to go next. And at the bottom of indi­vid­ual post pages like this one, there are links to recent posts and archive pages.

While this enforced redesign has mostly been about taking things away, there are a couple of new fea­tures. You can now style your com­ments using Mark­down, a clever system that lets you, say, sur­round a word with under­scores to make it appear in ital­ics, or make lists by typing an asterix before each item in the list. Also, com­ment spam should be less of a prob­lem now, so it won’t take as long for your com­ments to appear—if you com­ment here reg­u­larly, you might like to get a Type­Key iden­tity; that way, I can make you a ‘trusted commenter’, which means any­thing you write will appear imme­di­ately on the site.

If there’s any­thing from the old design you’d like to see back, or some­thing you can’t stand about the new one, do let me know in the com­ments. Oh, and if anyone is read­ing on a PC - how does it look? Screen­shots appreciated.

Right, enough boring posts, I’ve got hours of iPod nano drool­ing to catch up on.

Update: Thanks for the screen­shots, Donny and Paul! Things should be a little pret­tier for PC users now that Gara­mond steps in if you don’t have Hoe­fler Text, for that nice 16th Cen­tury feel. If you don’t have Gara­mond either, you’ll get Book Anti­qua, or, fail­ing that, Geor­gia, and, finally, unless you’re really font-​deprived, Times New Roman. Also, head­ers are now in Baskerville (which, again, Win­dows users won’t have installed by default). It’s enough to make one think of using sIFR.

Posted at 12pm on 08/09/05 by Jack Mottram to the site news category.
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  1. Look­ing good. Though I do have to say, I liked the orange links you were exper­i­ment­ing with, and you could do with some padding at the bottom of the page beneath the posts and cat­e­gories lists.

    Posted by MacDara at 1pm on 08.09.05

  2. Look­ing good

    Cheers! The orange links may yet make a return, it’s just that the site has been greyscale for so long, they burned my eyes. And I’m work­ing on the lack of padding at the bottom of the page - it’s there in the stylesheet, and Fire­fox ren­ders it prop­erly, but Safari doesn’t seem to want to. (And pos­si­bly other browsers too - what are you using MacDara?)

    Posted by Jack Mottram at 3pm on 08.09.05

  3. Hmmn. No matter where I apply padding and/or mar­gins - body, the con­tain­ing div, the div with all the stuff at the bottom in it - Safari still bumps against the bottom of the browser window. The XHTML val­i­dates, too, so I’m a bit stumped. Per­haps a cheeky little “ tag will fix it.

    Posted by Jack Mottram at 4pm on 08.09.05

  4. Yep, I’m using Safari 1.3.1.

    And by the way, there’s noth­ing wrong with using a few cheeky extra tags here and there.

    Posted by MacDara at 5pm on 08.09.05

  5. And by the way, there’s noth­ing wrong with using a few cheeky extra tags here and there.

    There are folk who would vehe­mently dis­agree with that! I’m not one of them, mind.

    In any case, adding a “ at the bottom did no good, and I’ve now tried every imag­in­able com­bi­na­tion of padding and mar­gins to no avail. I’ll try wrap­ping the stuff at the bottom in an extra div.

    Update, a little while later: fixed with the search box below. I could’ve used a `, or anything withclear:both` set in the CSS, but I quite like making the search more obvi­ous anyway. I sus­pect there’s either some­thing hor­ri­bly wrong in my (val­i­dated) CSS, or a bug in Safari to do with float­ing ele­ments. Either way, the page looks better now!

    Posted by Jack Mottram at 5pm on 08.09.05

  6. Oh yes, much better. Don’t you feel proud?

    Posted by MacDara at 9pm on 08.09.05

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