All in the <head>

– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

– Live from The Internets since 2003 –

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Armadillo v2

21 August 2004

Welcome to the new and improved allinthehead. It’s been a long while in the making, but a change in hosting (welcome to Textdrive by the way) gave me the reason to get my arse in gear and finish the revamp. So here we are.

First, a bit about the changes I’ve made. Apart from the obvious visual refresh, I’ve made some significant changes to the site’s architecture. Ever since this site launched it has been pretty much a single page, so for the first time we now have a main navigation bar at the top and a number of different sections. I’ve updated my About page (that was there before, but buried), and added an Archive page which lists the most recent 100 posts. I’ve tidied up the search results page and comments, and moved the links from the sidebar onto a page of their own.

A bit on the side

Creating a dedicated links page has opened up the space on the sidebar for a link-log: A bit on the side. This is a place for me to log interesting links without the requirement to post a whole article about them – I guess more of a traditional weblog idea. With A bit on the side comes new feeds – both RSS and ATOM.

It’s still a work in progress however, and there are bound to be rough edges. I’ve not validated the templates yet, so there will be errors.

So, I hope you like it. I’m by no means a designer, so any constructive feedback is welcome. I need to extend thanks to those who I’ve been bothering over the last few weeks, particularly Ethan and Dunstan for their comments, help and support, and Jon for his help with the link-log. Cheers guys.

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § kelly: Nice looks Drew. Subtle colors, and a nice contrast make things easy to read. Good job from a fellow TextDriver!
  2. § Hans: Nice… Pretty in pink. You’re brave, man.
    The sidebar’s overflowing over the footer (Firefox 0.9.2 WinXP) and well… wait a minute, can oyu even call that a footer?! Fix it! ;)
    Finally the about page is actually accessible (for -every_one). Good pink highlights everywhere… But something about the text in the header image just doesn’t seem right. I miss the Silkscreen (-ish?) title.
  3. § Ethan: Ah, that damned DNS finally got around to propagating.

    Lovely work, Drew—great to see the new skin in full effect.
  4. § Mary: I love it, simply smashing. Pink! That’s one of my blog’s soon-to-be colours. :)

    One problem though—you forgot to use numeric entities for your blog title and its causing a parse error in the main atom feed.
  5. § Mary: Oh and the new Atom feed as well. :(
    Sorry to double-post on you again.
  6. § Drew McLellan: Good catch, Mary. That’s a small Textpattern bug I need to find a fix for. Should be fine now.
  7. § Noah: Absolutely fantastic – I love it. In fact, it is one of the most refreshing designs I have seen for a while… well done!

    One point though. I’m no designer by any meens, but (in the header graphic) I would put the title on one line and knock the tagline right by a cm or two… hmmm, I don’t know – just an idea.
  8. § Drew McLellan: Thanks Noah. I did try the title all on one line, but it felt a little right-side-heavy with the brackets on the ‘head’. Additionally, I didn’t want to push the page too wide if I could help it.

    (Just verified the centralisation of the text, btw, and it’s pixel-perfect).
  9. § Small Paul: Gosh! Very pretty! It’s like a gentle, yet structured massage for the eyes.
  10. § Keith: Looks very nice Drew. Like the softness of it. Yeah, it’s great.
  11. § Dean Allen: w00t!
  12. § Rob Mientjes: Pretty! This is a nice design, to cut things clear. The text is easy to read and the text has enough space to breath. Nice one.
  13. § Reinier: Cool! Welcome to textdrive!
  14. § Colly: A sidebar link says ”(name here) has re-designed”. That’s when I prepare my eyes for that big instant impression – how the page washes over you straight off. I like detail, but my brain just knows if I like a design when it seems instantly balanced, has a good colour palette and makes me go “Ooooh” and tell my colleagues.

    The new All in the Head did this. Hooray! Just thought I’d explain why I needed to give it the thumbs up Drew…
  15. § Mary: Hey, how do you feel about sharing your process for working with Textpattern? I understand “Textpattern’s semantics” in theory—in practice is another matter. :)
  16. § Noah: Reading Colly’s post I thought I should add to his comments.

    When, as per my usual morning ritual, I opened up a few of my favorite blogs to peruse for new posts (yes, I do know about RSS but I havn’t found a good newsreader for SuSe Linux) I finnaly got to “All In The Head” and just thought “Wow!”.....

    I instantly had to tell the whole design team here where I work to go check it out (and a few others on the other side of the pond). :D
  17. § steve: I love the color scheme, and the main page stands out just enough.

    One thing I would say is that on my monitor, the line length of body text is too long to read properly.

    I realise this is normally a problem with fluid layouts, but a % margin here and there, possible using max-width for the standards complient, or a (partially?) fluid sidebar would certainly help my late night eyes read some of your content, as well as take in the subtle design!!

    all the best
  18. § Kim Siever: Love the drop-shadows that readjust for browsers sizes. Very cool. It’d be better if there was a way to do i semantically, but it’s cool nonethless. ;-)
  19. § Seth Thomas Rasmussen: The new design looks great, Drew! Honestly, a great upgrade. I enjoyed the minimalism of the old design, and that doesn’t feel lost now. It feels enhanced. Bravo. It’s beautiful. :)
  20. § Tom: Hey Drew, remember me? Heh.

    Loving the new design, it’s b-e-a-utiful! Particularly liking the ‘no good swindler’ bit, classic :)
  21. § John Serris: Drew, I seriously love the new look! Can’t believe scrivs only gave it a noteworthy over at the vault
  22. § Jesse Rodgers: Cool design.. finally got some internet access that lets me see it ;)

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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