Yes, I’ve changed my theme a little. After many wasted hours playing with css hacks, and fancy pop up menus, again all with css, I’ve ended up with something plain and traditional. It probably looks rubbish in IE, because I haven’t got round to aligning the boxes up properly. IE users, I can tell you, though, it looks so much better in Firefox…

I’ve also moved the blog into the root directory of my website. I was getting bored of having that /thoughts/ part, and having finally realised that I wasn’t going to use this URL for anything other than the blog, figured I might as well move it. So if your bookmarks point to http://www.neildewhurst.com/thoughts, please change them to http://www.neildewhurst.com. You should be redirected in any case.

The header image comes from Image After, in case you’re wondering. I should try to find a better one at some point, but in the end I’ll get round to doing my own. Sadly, my PC is out of action until I buy a new hard drive, so that will have to wait a while. (EDIT: The old header did: the current header is entirely of my own making, and in fact, since writing this post, I’ve completely re-themed. Again.)

Happy reading!

December 10th, 2005, posted by Administrator in Uncategorized · No comments

If your web site was a plant, what would it look like?

OrganicHTML will show you, although quite how it works, I couldn’t begin to guess. What I do know is that this blog looks a little less healthy than I’d like it to…

November 2nd, 2005, posted by Neil in Uncategorized · No comments

An account of how a css novice took the splendidly straightforward Kubrick-based default theme, and with a bit of research here and there, managed to turn it into his own version of Kubrick, and how, from there, he then added a third column, and wondered whether too much whitespace could ever be a bad thing.

In short, how I went from:

First stab

to:

Default theme remixed

and on to:

3c-space

Issues

• How much whitespace is too much whitespace? On 1600×1200, which I usually use, there’s quite a gap over to the third column. I don’t mind it - will others?
• How does the blog look at different resolutions? As far as I know, unless you try to squeeze the page really narrow, the divs don’t overlap. 800×600 even looks readable.
• How scalable is this theme? It looks fine on my machines, with my browser settings, but that’s al I know of…
• What exactly is the point of the third column? I have vague ideas for what to put in there other than logging in and out type links, but at the moment, it’s cruelly under-utilised.

Future tweaks

• Add more category images. Not so that the place looks cluttered, but if I can come with nice little icons like the poker chip, I’ll use them
• Think about moving ‘Recent comments’ to the right hand column, and expanding it
• Use right hand column for external info, news RSS output, photo thumbnails, my audioscrobbler info etc
• Increased linkage - for the moment I’ve stuck with the default information set on every post - ie content and metadata, but I’d like to include links off to other topics, or a section for external links after each post. A kind of “Further reading” idea.

Current theme - Random Angles

Not a very descriptive name for the current theme, truth be told, since all the angles are very carefully arranged, and all the boxes align sweetly (in IE and Firefox).

As of now, I still have plenty of ideas for improvement, and plenty of leaks to plug:

August 19th, 2005, posted by Administrator in Uncategorized · No comments

Get me publishing…

July 13th, 2005, posted by Debs in Uncategorized · No comments

One day I’ll have content here. Perhaps. For now though I’m just kinda playing around with Wordpress…

July 13th, 2005, posted by Neil in Uncategorized · 14 Comments