Tuesday, 9 September 2003

New Site Design

Since we didn’t have anything better to do Mikey and I redesigned my site. We tried to be subtle about it so the change is not too radical. I really like the new design. It looks, hm, happier than the old one. So what’s new?

  • The color scheme is slightly different, but we stuck to grey/blue/orange.
  • I pixeled a few icons which are now used for certain elements of the site. The fish icon is for the people who complained that there’s neither dog nor fish on here.
  • Mikey is now a guest author. So expect posts from him soon. To better distinguish between our posts I pixeled avatar icons for each of us that show up next to the entry title.
  • There is now finally an RSS feed available.
  • Other stuff that mostly makes the site easier to administrate.

Only webdesigners will probably appreciate the following:

  • The design is now table-less and validates XHTML 1.0 Strict (something that is not easily achieved when building parts of your site dynamically since you have not much control over what happens to your content during the building process).
  • Links are now real permalinks and don’t reveal the technology used to make the page they are linking to (this allows for method changes like using php instead of plain html without changing the URL). The old links are now redirected to the new links, so as to not destroy existing links to subpages of adognamedfish.

You may have experienced strange things in the past few days. This was due to problems we ran into when we tried to rebuild the whole site. Our hoster uses a cgi-wrapper which limits the cpu time, RAM and child processes a cgi-script is allowed to use. When trying to rebuild the whole site we ran into those limitations. I got so bad that we couldn’t even rebuild a single entry. That also meant that it was not possible to post new entries. Also comments would be saved but did not show up on the site.

Mikey wrote an email to the hoster and their reaction was very nice. They loosened the restrictions a bit for us and now we still have some minor problems but rebuilding works again. Let’s hope this will do for a while.

Okay, so I hope everybody likes the new design. We’re certainly happy with it.

[Archive Link]  Posted by Edda at 20:32 CET

Comments


[Comments Link]  1. Posted by Lena on 9 September, 2003 22:05 CET

I like your new design.The icons are really good, I particular like the bubble for the comments.

[Comments Link]  2. Posted by Swampy on 18 September, 2003 14:47 CET

certainly

[Comments Link]  3. Posted by on 20 September, 2003 21:24 CET

Needs more pink