I have just updated this site with a new theme which I made myself. It’s heavily inspired by Openswitchs’ theme of about six months ago which he moved on from pretty quickly but I really loved. I however saw similar designs by Extralogical, eightface, and binarybonsai all which have in some part inspired me to go to a single column layout.
This being a blog its really about the content and writing and I hope the new theme will help focus everyone on that, well me at least. The format should help me also make asides in a better way and differentiate between shorter link posts and proper articles. The sidebars are at the bottom with a thinner one for shorter lists and wider one for text and longer more structured lists.
Also I wanted to have a go and do a little CSS, I also got pulled into some PHP as well, and it made me realise how much like a building a webpage can be, I could go off on one with a debate about structure/decoration compared to php/css rant but I’ll refrain from proving to you all my own madness.
The Design is called Rorschach, for a few reasons, and it’s a Sandbox theme with a couple of tweaks. It’s unfinished at the moment and comments and single page in particular are legible but not set out that well. Spacing is a bit wonky in explorer, I’ll fix and tweak this over time though and try to clean up the css as I go. So pay a visit to this site, have a poke around and please tell me what you think.
Some sandbox Resources:
- Check out op111.net for a great starter on how to choose your minimalist design.
- Plaintxt of course for THE sandbox.
- Themeshaper the blog is a great resource and Thematic should be on everyones shortlist for a theme.
Phew! this monkey has been on my shoulder for a while, glad that’s out of the way. Oh and thanks to kickflop for the php code for the date alteration and everyone on the sandbox forum.
great work – nice and minimalist.
on those crazy days when i try to go messing with my own i do tend to get bogged down in “start again” or “tweak some more”. i always tweak some more and invariably break somethings
if you use dreamweaver i really liked this: http://www.themedreamer.com/ – i’ll have a look at the resources you mentioned the next time i have a fit of madness and go messing with php
Noticed a couple of posts ago things had changed. Very clean, balanced look.
We’re more into eclecticism / expressionism / richness-of-experience than minimalism – guess that shows on our page!
PS. Have you seen the H&dM hotel proposals yet?
The new look is very stylish and sleek. I like it.
I never got the WordPress (or any other blog-engine) to do all the things I wanted it to do, not matter how much I tweaked and added plugins. Usually the tweaking would’ve required such a huge amount of work that using a ready-made engine didn’t make any sense. Finally I decided to do my own.
And even if I haven’t (yet) gotten where I want to go with this approach, at least I’m moving there slowly.
I must admit that some of the new projects that are out there can do most of the stuff I want, but not quite… Like I’d like to have the blogging features from WordPress, lifestream capabilities from Sweetcron, quotes from Tumblr, status updates ála Jaiku etc One feature from there and one from here and polish it all with a nice AJAX interface.
Currently I have the backend done. The backend takes care of the tags, scheduling, database queries, searches…
In theory, all should need to do is to code a very simple plug-in for a service/feature and that would be it. In reality, I just haven’t taken the time to do it.
@Darren,
themedreamer looks pretty good I just never have used dreamweaver at least not yet. I used the webdeveloper addon for firefox to dabble with the css live.
@enndee,
H&dM proposals are a little worrying to be honest. I posted about them here. It’s really unclear to me just how good or bad the proposals are.
@Jukka,
Sounds like you have just about written your own blogging platform, I’m suitably impressed! Maybe one day we will get to see it.
Bah… since I added a few things to the theme I’ve managed to break it in IE! see if I can fix it over the next few days..