Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Using BlueprintCSS for Drupal
First, the design is a work in process. I know it sucks right now. But BlueprintCSS is awsome for layouts. There are not too many tutorials that go into detail on how to use it. But it’s simple, so no worry. I just used it to build the layout and used a seperate stylesheet for the presentation. I am not sure of the correct practice. But it’s simple. And who needs flexible width designs. I’m done at least for now with flexible width. No more creating images to stretch. Everything is a predictable size and that’s the way I like it.
YourStreet Beta
I got an invite to Yourstreet beta today. I thought, "Cool, I’m special", until I realized that I signed up for the invite a while back.
On the top there’s a map that you can drag around on or zoom and resize. There are three types of markers on the map: news, conversations and neighbors. You click on any one of these and get details. You can also choose whether to see news from today, the last week, the last month, or the last three months. Below the map are listings of the local news stories.
Design by Accident
The alignment of the logo in the header was an accident. Didn’t really mean to put it there, but I forgot to adjust the size of the top black bar. My name was supposed to go inside the black bar. But I uploaded the change and saw the the accident. I was about to fix when I decided it looked better.
I have to admit that I don’t know as much as I should about css. The tricks. The workarounds. And especially dealing with the differences between Firefox and IE7. We don’t even want to throw Safari and Opera in the mix. But I always check them just in case. And as long as they look presentable, although not the same, I go with it.
Hacking WordPress Themes
I don’t know if you can it being a perfectionist, but i can’t really rest until a site I have does everything I want it to do. If it doesn’t fit, it just doesn’t fit. The main issue with the template I was using before was space. I was running out of space. It didn’t matter if I wrote a longer post or not, the sidebar still stretched out to be twice as long as the content. I wanted it to fit my average sized post better. The orange and black were boring me. Way too dark for my liking.
A New WordPress Theme
I went off on a tangent today because I was tired of working aorund the limitations of this WordPress Theme. I started on my own. The inspiration came from a WIRED cover. WIRED is very visually appealing magazine. Always at the forefront with new uses for fonts, alignment, and symbols. This is the cover.
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