4 November 2005
Cloud: Not being able to keep solid food down/sit up/think straight/do much of anything other than feel sorry for yourself and barf your guts up for the best part of three days
Silver lining: losing enough weight that not only do your clothes not fit quite as snugly as they did earlier in the week, but your boots are looser on your legs
The timing sucked, but it's been an interesting learning experience - most notably that the world will not fall on my head if every little detail of my site isn't absolutely perfect.
So I went back to work today, and tonight have managed to start pulling the various bits of the site into line with the new design.
First up was the sorting out of the archives - both the main archives index page (which now includes thumbnails of all the images in the gallery) and the monthly archive pages - and a few minor tweaks to whitespace and the main navigation.
Then there was the compilation of an all singing, all dancing pixeldiva feed, which not only has the posts, but the links and the flickr feed merged into it.
Now, I don't really use feeds, and I don't know what those of you who use the feeds want, but if you want it split, or want more or less or whatever, just let me know and I'll do my best to get it sorted.
I'd also be interested to know if there's any interest in a photos feed, or whether you don't care, so feed readers, this is your time to speak up!
Then, over the weekend I'll be sorting out the individual photo pages, the "others" page and the about page, which will contain (if I ever get round to writing the damn thing) an explanation of what I did here and why. Then I might shut TopStyle and not look at code for at least... oh, as long as it is before I go back to work.
In the meantime though, thank you all so much for your feedback, it's very much appreciated, and as always, if something's trashed, tell me. If you don't like something, let me know and I'll have a think about whether it's something I want to change. If you think I could do something better, give me a nudge and I'll see what I can do.
Just excuse any wobbles, these new boots are gonna take a bit more breaking in before they're comfy.
I've just come across your blog and I just wanted to say that it's masterpiece of design (a totally superficial observation I know). You've achieved the sort of "clean" look I could only dream of achieving.
And a merged feed sounds like a cool idea to me - sort of like a "subscribe to everything I do" option.
Glad to hear you're over your ailment. That's a pretty good silver lining as they go. Maybe I could do with some of that!
As for feeds: a combined feed is great. I used feedburner to splice in my del.icio.us links, flickr photos and blog posts in to one feed. That said, I've recently started using BlogBridge for feed reading (still trialing it) and that allows you to define a feed as being image based, which is obviously much nicer for looking at photo feeds, but won't work on a mixed type feed, so a separate photo feed would be nice too.
Great work on the reboot, I think it looks great. The only thought I had, spurred by someone's comment about the moving navigation when switching to the full post view, was that maybe you could keep the nav in the middle and put the comments on the right hand side. Just a thought.
Glad to hear you're on the up. Love the redesign; whether by design or default, it's a masterpiece of function over form, but the form is just brilliant; it works.
Nothing else out there like it. It's bold, the photos are just stunning and it's a great read. Love it. Well done.
Derek: Will have a look into providing a photo feed.
As for the middle nav thing, I'd thought about that, but felt that it broke up the flow of the post and comments and just kinda got in the way.
As for position of nav, once past the home page it's always going to stay down the right hand side because mostly it's going to be the last thing people look for, and it makes more sense for it to be there next to the scroll bar.
So probably won't move it, but thanks for the suggestion anyway.
... the online home and (not very) alter(ed)-ego of Ann McMeekin, a recently freelance Web Accessibility Consultant.
... passionate about many things, most of which will turn up on this site at some time or other.
... contactable via email.
Design and content copyright 2000-2007 pixeldiva, except where noted.
Copyright of comments remains with the individual author.
All rights reserved.
Left comments