As you can see, I've updated the look of this here little blog o' mine. I know it's not quite perfect and I'm sure some of y'all out there would do a much better job of making it pretty, but I think it's not too shabby for a graphically-challenged programmer-type such as myself. It's still using dasBlog, of course, and I still have a bit to do before it's completely finished ... I want to add some additional graphical decorations and need to do some work on the admin stuff ... but it's mostly there. I also need to add some more blogs to the blog roll.
I would like to thank a couple of folks for inspiration:
- Ben Scheirman: His presentation at the Austin Code Camp seemed to make me think that I could actually pull this off using CSS only for the layout. And also provide some tips. Additionally, I examined (in detail) the layout and CSS for www.dasblog.info, which he designed. So ... after some 10 years or so of using tables for layout, I'm finally moving past them.
- Joshua Flanagan: I pretty much took the <fieldset> idea for the individual blog items from his site design.
- John Forsythe: I started with his DirectionalRedux theme for dasBlog. It is somewhat unrecognizable now, but it did provide the base. And a lot of it really didn't change much.
- The whole dasBlog team, of course!
Some notes on the trials and tribulations ...
You saw, I'm sure, the issue that I came across if my previous entry. If not, well, go check it out then!
That said, the templating engine for dasBlog, while powerful was, IMHO, somewhat difficult to work with ... no editor design support. While I do use HTML view for my markup, I still like the designer views. That's pretty minor though, considering the functionality and flexibility provided by dasBlog.
Now, I am using Framework 3.5 for the AJAX support and the AJAX Control Toolkit. However, I found that enabling the search highlighting feature of dasBlog blew that up (at least that's what it looked like). So I turned it off. While it was somewhat difficult to figure out, it's really not that big of a deal.
Overall, most of the real trials and tribulations were all my fault ... I'm just graphically challenged and that's that. Ensuring that the site looked OK in both IE and FireFox was fun ... each one has it's own little quirks ... but I'm sure that's not a surprise to any of you. There will be additional updates in the future but, for now, I'm going to start Memorial Day weekend by blowing something up. Virtually, of course! ;-)