Russell Beattie

So I got 18 responses on my "What do you think of my new design" post which I think is awesome. I'm not going to respond to every single one, but I wanted to sum up some of the feelings here and tell you that I appreciate the comments and am going to take them all to heart.

Generally the comments were positive, but the main issue was line length. Four people voiced problems against, another four said there were no problems and some others gave some suggestions on how to minimize/maximize the column. I'm not sure what to think of this. It's not "standard" by any stretch, but I think I like the uniqueness of it and its simplicity. Just to let you know, as a base I started with the most basic design and then looked at Duncan's Blog for inspiration and used his margin numbers on my CSS. It's all a matter of personal preference, but I think since the window and fonts can easily be resized, anyone who is annoyed by the width of my posts can easily shrink the page up a bit and get what they're looking for. That'll have to be good enough for now until I can come up with a more optimal solution.

One idea that I'm really going to look into is Jano's suggestion for multiple style sheets using the javascript Style Switcher. That's a really great idea. If you notice on the top right of the Wired News' new XHTML site, there's a text size button which allows you to adjust the size of the text. And the International Herald Tribune has that amazing dynamic column mode which also would be really cool to play with. Imagine each post with modifiable columns and dynamic next page buttons? Very cool.

About the background. Notebooks in Spain all use graph paper. Don't ask me why. When my wife sees the 1/4 inch spaced blue lines of American notebooks she laughs and says it's like being in Kindergarten. Anyways, I guess I'm used to the Spanish notebooks now and thought it would be a nice background. It's just a design element to help spice up the page a bit. If it's reeeeally annoying I'll get rid of it, but I kind of like it now. Maybe I need to make it even lighter?

After a day or so (err one day?) I really miss my referrers, so I'm going to make an effort and do something Trackback/Pingback like - but since I never actually see those work on any other blogs, I'll probably just rip some code off of Rolling Blogger and implement the referrers like Dave's got his. Sort of a Mark Pilgrim summary. This will take some thought, but it's going to happen.

The weirdest comment award goes to Don... he said the new design reminded him of obituary postings in a newspaper. UGH! DON! Wow! Since no one else mentioned this (or agreed), I'm hoping it's just sort of a personal mental thing you've got going. LOL. ;-)

The design definitely needs some tweaking, but will have to wait until next weekend when I can start playing with CSS again. For those of you who've done that you know how many hours you can lose getting some widget to move 2 pixels to the left just beause you want it that way. I'm going concetrate on tweaking the black bar thing and the width issues and maybe add some dancing monkeys and then it should be done. ;-)

Thanks again to everyone for their comments!

-Russ