All done

All entries on the to-do list for this website’s redesign are checked off. Well, all but one, but hey, that’s alright with me.

So, what’s changed?

Well, there’s obviously the new color scheme and ‘fancy’ CSS trickery like @font-face, box- and text-shadows. For the latter you’ll need a decent browser, or just sit tight until it’s 2020 and Microsoft has finally caught up. Besides, do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser? (Which is exactly why IE6 gets the Universal IE6 CSS treatment, as I’m way past caring about that bug ridden, incompetent, worthless excuse for a piece of shit browser.)

Then I hacked around the Sandbox theme a bit. Out of the box it’s pretty awesome for styling with all it’s CSS-hooks, but there were some things that I wanted done differently: I am the only author here, so there is no need for links to author pages; the default archive page is a long list of months, and I wanted something more compact so I adapted the Smart Archive plugin to suit my needs; I wanted an easy way to add post-specific styles (see the fancy highlight in my Where’s Willie? post below); and I wanted short url’s for posting on Twitter that didn’t need Tinyurl et al, for which the Twitter Friendly Links plugin works like a charm.

I also completely revamped the sidebar, using javascript to pull in my latest tweets, tracks and photo from Twitter, Last.fm and Flickr. Added mobile and print style sheets for those who require those, and finally I tweaked the footer. Then, today, as I beheld my work, I saw that it was good. Well, good enough anyway. And just before the deadline too.