JOEHEWITT.COM

Quasi-daily thoughts. No cute taglines.

Thursday July 7

A New Design

JoeHewitt.com has been sporting the same look for three years now. In that time, I've actually re-designed the site several times, but I never was able to follow through on it. My excuse was usually that I didn't have time to get all the details right. And what details there are!

I had two major priorities for this re-design:

  1. Making the blog commenting user interface feel "just right"
  2. I guess you would call my blog commenting system an example of "Ajax", but it was born in 2002, when Ajax was still just a cleaning product. I always felt that the design was clumsy and difficult to use, despite all the nifty Javascript goodness. This time around, I've added a few nice touches. For instance, comments now scroll smoothly into view when you open them, new comments are inserted instantly into the page, and you get some nice progress notification to let you know if your comment went through.

  3. Cut the multimedia extravaganza and get back to being a blog about software
  4. I like to write software, and I like to write about software. I'm not going to try and distract you with my music collection or my photo galleries when you just came here to read about some neat stuff I've been coding in Python.

I think the design of this site is now just about as clean as it possibly can be. I tried not to go overboard with fancy graphics, but did indulge a little bit and went for the big drop shadow. One neat trick: try increasing the font size of your browser (Control-+ in Firefox). Notice how everything expands nicely, including the drop shadow. I employed a clever CSS technique that I just discovered a few days ago. I'll be writing some more about how this works in an upcoming post.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated (that means you, Grossberg).

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