Comments on: Great Designers Steal, And So Do I

By: Richard Atkins

Richard Atkins — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:03:38 +0000

On a somewhat related tangent, I see that Alex King has released an updated version of his WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, including handling to make clickable things finger width/height. Seems like it might be interesting to hack around with, and given that your setup is more fruit-flavoured than most in my neighbourhood, maybe you can give it a whirl on your iPhone? It'd be good to know how far away your theme is from working nicely with this kind of plugin...

By: alastair

alastair — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 22:44:11 +0000

Wow, I had no idea my asides would be so popular. Take this random person on IRC for instance:

http://girtby.net/archives/2009/01/11/they-dont-call-it-hardware-for-nothing/ is probably the first web page I’ve ever seen where I’d expect
to be a useful element
although by “useful element” I just mean “different way of spelling
”

Rather a backhanded complement I admit…

By: Richard Atkins

Richard Atkins — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:01:37 +0000

They are indeed fixed. Thanks for that!

It took me a while to find an example of the asides Julian was referring to, but for those reading along, your recent article on hardware hacking has a couple of good ones (Google Reader does not do these justice, as their layout/formatting is really quite pleasant).

The clinical look is growing on me, but I think I'd still prefer some gentle colours - even if they're shades of grey!

By: alastair

alastair — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:41:40 +0000

Thanks Julian, appreciated. They're quite easy really:

.aside {
    float:left;
    width: 152px;
    font-size: 12px;
    margin-left: -177px;
    margin-top: -18px;
    padding-top: 18px;
    border-top: 1px solid #ccc;
    border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
    margin-bottom: 18px;
}

By: Julian

Julian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 11:12:18 +0000

I am totally jealous of your side-bar asides, on the lefthand side of some of your posts…

By: alastair

alastair — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:32:56 +0000

Richard: Fixed the next/prev links. Or at least I think I have. Should wordpress do this sort of thing automatically? I searched and found some very old discussions about this. Also I found this which seems to suggest it's a theme issue.

By: alastair

alastair — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:32:09 +0000

Thanks for the comments everyone.

Richard:

Suggest you turn your brightness down a bit if it's burning you!

Good idea on the screenshot. Don't know what's going on with the next/prev links - more wordpress breakage?

I won't blame wordpress for the archives page though - and will lick/split/whatever to fix them ASAP.

By: Richard Atkins

Richard Atkins — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:49:26 +0000

It looks stark. I’m not sure if I like the burning white look on my 24″ monitor yet. We shall see.

Can I suggest a screenshot of the blog as it is, so that any future UI changes don’t make this meta blogging completely irrelevant. This would be just like recent updates in the neighborhood.

You’re wordpress setup has confused the Firefox Link Widgets extension on my browser, and I think it’s because its not finding the previous and next links (since they’re not among the link header items). E.g. rather than next linking to http://girtby.net/archives/2008/12/29/software-that-goes-clunk/, it seems to want to go to http://girtby.net/archives/2008/12/29/great-designers-steal-and-so-do-i/, and that’s just wrong.

Also: the archive page that Julian mentions has some (nasty) layout problems… which I’m sure will be resolved lickety-split!

Do you need to state the copyright date on the footer of the page? This might make it easier on future generations trying to figure out when this stuff entered/will enter the public domain.

By: alphajuliet

alphajuliet — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 11:00:23 +0000

Err yes, very elegantly minimal. Certainly no colour combinations to complain about here. And it goes with my Macbook. Gee, you think of everything.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 16:47:24 +0000

Nice clean look.

I have the same instinct about fixed columns, though I have to admit I'm not much of a Web designer. Good luck keeping things fluid.