If you’ve been wondering what happened to that Wii post I mentioned last week, well I got a bit distracted. I got to thinking that I could stand to make a few changes to the stylesheet, which led to a few changes to the page construction, which led to not wanting to write the Wii impressions nor anything else until I had updated the site. Now, perhaps, things can continue in their normal fashion.

Comfortable Text, Elastic Design

My first priority was text, as the majority of the web is text. I based my text redesign on The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. I eliminated the default margins applied to the top and bottom of paragraphs, set a standard line height, and altered the text indentation to only subsequent paragraphs. I feel that this creates a much healthier flow similar to printed works.

The divisions, which I have reduced to as few as possible to maintain the site design, are based on ems rather than pixels or percents. As the text size is enlarged or reduced using the normal browser controls the site layout will shift accordingly.

Goodbye Categories, Hello Tags

Gone are the categories that TextPattern uses to organize content. It isn’t that I think these are broken, I just found that my posts tended to not fit the categories I had defined. Not to mention, my choice of category names left much to be desired. Now, each article or photo has a set of tags that describe its contents. Clicking any of these tags will produce a list of articles or photos tagged with that keyword. In the future I plan to go back and associate tags with the past articles in order to bring them up to speed with this new organizational system.

The Archive is on Hiatus

I am still debating about how to present the archive and as such it has been temporarily removed from the sidebar. With the removal of categories it no longer seems appropriate to sort the archive in that manner. It will be back shortly.

Broken IE Compatibility

I certainly do not aim to disorient the users of the world’s most popular browser, but I refuse to make use of crippled binary transparency just because IE doesn’t support alpha transparency without hacks. I’m working on installing those hacks to reduce the ugliness of the PNG fade and quote mark. Besides, there’s really no excuse not to be using Firefox or Opera.

So, there you have it. A new dawn is breaking on Sorrytown, USA. Or something.