by Ethan Johnson
August 28, 2006

I took the liberty of setting the new "default" template. This one is a blend of the default Drupal template that we've been using for several months, and a customized one that is more to my/our liking. It's not completely "there" yet, but I believe that the "bloggy" look has been essentially eradicated and over time will firm up to reflect the true nature of the site.

Technical Summary

Despite my earlier flip-out, I managed to hack together a CSS-heavy layout. I did have to cheat and use the "table" tag once or twice as - surprise! - CSS can't center the &#$@%$@ overall layout, unless it suddenly can now. I threw a "table" box around the whole shootin' match and centered it. Most of the rest of it is CSS and DIV-based trickery.

Rant I

I'm not sure WTF is so great about CSS-based layout. This hacked-up template took DAYS to produce, whereas Ye Olde Table Layout would have been done and functional inside of 30 minutes. (With CSS calling the elemental shots.) The ONLY upside that I am seeing so far is that I can set a "max-width" and "min-width" for a given element, which helps prevent the old "table cell gets squished down to nothing" issue short of declaring "nowrap", which is lame. Minimum width is 780px. Max is 1280px. Deal. I'm not going to take 5000-inch screens into consideration, and if you have 640 x 480, revolt against whoever stuck you with such a crappy monitor. If you have a monster-sized monitor, you'll just get a lot of white space on the sides.

Rant II

What doesn't IE understand about "height: 5px"??!!!! Lame. Opera and Firefox do the right thing. Sheesh.

Current Changes

• Side navigation block has been replaced with top navigation bar.
• Side blocks have been pared down in favor of strategic links or content directories.
• Web Feeds block has been replaced by "web feed directory" link at the bottom of every page.
• Default "bloggy" front page has been replaced by static front page to direct traffic to areas of interest (by author). This may screw up our Technorati juice, but then again, that's not why we created this site (pre-Technorati), so if that happens, c'est la vie.
• Site feeds have been expanded to "full" feeds due to the removal of the "bloggy" front page. Most readers have no clue as to the sheer volume of feeds that this site generates on demand, beyond the few feeds I spelled out in the directory. Trust me, we generate feeds on top of feeds, so your information needs should be well tended to. Subscribe with confidence.

Forthcoming Changes

• Spiffed-up content directory pages to gel better with the new site design.
• Tweaked front page design. (Example: Mar wants a different ND logo.)
• Gallery of selected photos by Ethan Johnson.
• Texas Sky Gallery. Maybe - I haven't taken sky photos in a long time so we'll see. Or not.
• Gallery of dog photos (finally).
• Cooking how-to videos (maybe).

Work continues apace, and may be plain transparent (or utterly uninteresting) to most/all of you. Like the new look? Hate it? Neutral? Let me know, thanks! <EM>