Site Redesign

Does this site look completely wonky to you? I’ve just implemented a new design! Most likely you’ve got some old files cached. Clear your cache and refresh (or, just refresh about 20 times and your browser will get the hint and clear the cache itself). Of course, you might also be using Internet Explorer 6, in which case my annoying alert dialog box should have already goaded you into upgrading. If that’s the case, enough said.

Does this site look a little wonky to you? In that case, then you are probably a better graphic designer than I and/or you’ve discovered that the new design isn’t 100% implemented yet. If I’m lucky, it’s the latter. At any rate, I’ve already spent far more time in the past 24 hours working on this than I’d have expected to, given the limited extent of the results, but I’m a little burned out, so I’ll be finishing a few things (like the background on the footer and a few other little graphical touches) over the next few days. Oh, and I’ve only done the bare minimum trying to update the “Offspring” pages to work with the new look. (It took me about an hour of hunting before I realized/remembered that some of the style settings for the gallery pages are actually in the plug-in settings in WordPress and not in the Gallery2 files at all.) But I am hoping to make the move from Gallery2 to the Dutch Monkey’s DM Albums plug-in soon anyway.

Site girth expansion

I’ve just finished a modification to the site design. I was starting to feel a bit too confined by the narrowness of the old layout, so I’ve basically kept things intact design-wise, but I’ve expanded the layout to be more suitable to today’s 1024×768-or-greater standard screen resolution. I’ve also bumped up the size of the type slightly.

The only design element that’s noticeably different is the little greenish weirdness at the right end of the photos in the header bar. This was something I spent a great deal of time developing for an old, shortlived design that was part of my quickly-abandoned experiment with running the site on Drupal. I may end up getting rid of it again; I just thought it deserved a second chance.

Now then, if you’ve actually visited this site sometime before, you may find the pages are looking somewhat garbled; sadly that’s the side effect of keeping a lot of the filenames the same; your browser likely has old versions of these files cached. Hit the Refresh button a few times or perhaps clear your cache. I did the Refresh thing, but I had to hit it about 4 times before all of the files actually updated. Sheesh, you’d think I was using a Microsoft product or something, not Firefox!

Clear your cache!

Just a friendly reminder to clear your cache… or at least force a refresh. I’ve recently changed a few elements of the design of my site, including the background image. So if you’re still seeing the orange band on the left side (and, now, repeated behind the body of the page), please refresh!

You should be seeing a tiled background of isometric cubes (think Q*Bert), and various font styles have also been updated.

Not that you care. But if I wanted the orange band to still be there, I’d have left it!

Refresh the Page. Twice.

Although the tan-on-brown color scheme was… er… unique, and crisp to read on an LCD screen (which is all I own), I got tired of how smudgy and illegible it appeared on the ultra-X-treem high resolution CRT I use at work. (Uh… I mean… not that I… uh…)

So it was that I changed the color scheme of the site. But most browsers (at least Firefox, which is what I use) keep the CSS and image files cached more persistently than page content, so on first glance the pages here come off with the same circa 1978 color palette as before, just with a white page background instead of black.

If that’s what you’re seeing, for the love of Jehosephat* refresh the page now!

OK. Now I know what you’re seeing (at least if you’re using Firefox). This time around everything’s blue… except a little less than halfway across, the header graphic changes from blue to the old orange scheme. Ack! Refresh again!

Ah… that’s the stuff.

If it still looks like crap, maybe it’s your browser. You might need to actually clear the cache or something. Just don’t blame me. I already told you to use Firefox.

* Side note re: Jehosephat. What little I know about biblical King Jehosephat comes from hearing the phrase “jumpin’ Jehosephat” in passing, and the few minutes of Googling I did right after I posted this. (After all, I figured if I was enticing my reader [sic] with the love of Jehosephat as a reward for doing as I command, then perhaps I should know whether or not said love is desirable.)

From what I gather, King J. was a respectable fellow. For more on the matter, I direct you to the very Google search I myself undertook. But beware… as is often the case in life, that road is fraught with peril… and completely impertinent links. Seems the king himself is not exactly a hot topic around the virtual water cooler. Oh well… off you go!