Rands Version 4
Ok, last post on the redesign and then I’ll start writing about the Zen of Terminal windows.
Four categories of notes: Disasters, Tools, Hmmmm, and Shout Outs. Let’s start with:
Disasters:
» I’ve used the same basic CSS design for the last three sites. The updated About page touches on this, but the fact is — I’ve got a years of cruft in my CSS files. It’s not pretty. Problem is, I learned CSS as I’ve designed and redesigned sites which means all my ignorance is stored there. I need to construct the next site from the ground up to purge the CSS crap.
» There are a decent number of folks who read the site and, for those who return, I’d like to create some type of community, but weblogs are not the place to have a complex conversation. This is mostly a user interface issue — most standard commenting system are linear which means you’ll never know if your witty comment actually struck a chord without going back and paging through every damned comment.
I kept cycling on the community idea during the redesign… there are good web-based conversation tools out there, but I’ve didn’t find a slick way of integration them with weblog entries.
» Trackbacks are gone. I get the idea, I turned them on because I thought they’d be valuable, but my experience with trackbacks for the last six months has focused entirely on trackback spam. For the eight of you who used trackbacks in the past few months, I apologize, but the effort involved with keeping this particular pipe open is not worth it.
SpamLookup does a fine job of drastically reducing comment and trackback spam. I went from daily comment spam maintenance to thinking something was wrong with the weblog when I didn’t see any comment spam for a week. SpamLookup did force me to reconsider my trackback ban, but I’m assuming it’s only a matter of time before spammers find a way around SpamLookup… so trackbacks are gone.
» Oh yeah, here are three logos that didn’t happen: One, two, and three. (Also, I miss the hat background)
Tools:
» I’ve had Transmit installed for years, but for some reason, this was the first time I used it for a major project. It rules.
» Similarly, I finally figured out the use of column view in Finder. Can’t live without it now when managing piles of files.
» The document drawer in BBEdit 8 was equally invaluable. At the peak of development, I had three separate windows open. One for new documents, one for referral templates from the old site, and another for templates in the new site. Add drag’n’drop from BBEdit to Finder to Transmit and I was the king of the world.
» I have a 20” and a 17” flat panel at home and I feel very cramped. This is not bragging — this is a simple fact — you can never ever have enough screen real estate.
» While there is still much to learn, I made a nice experience leap with Photoshop. It transformed from WORLDS MOST EXPENSIVE CROPPING TOOL to a product I feel I can actually manage.
» I can not live without xScope.
Hmmmm:
» The orange toolbar is just a list with CSS smeared all over it. I was in awe that CSS has that level of flexibility.
» The toolbar also uses very subtle gradients. I’ve so abused gradients in the past… I had no idea they were elegant.
» The letter-spacing CSS attribute does nifty things to text.
» I still don’t know how CSS figures out line-height.
Shout-outs:
I’d like the thank the following sites for various forms of design inspiration:
» Veer — A good jump off place for ideas. Also: Orange.
» Los Gatos High — My high school. Didn’t look at their website once during the design period, but you’ll notice our colors were black and, wait for it, orange. You now have additional insight to this horrible logo.
» ProFont — Very nice font which is readable at 9pt. Handy when there is HTML CODE EVERYWHERE.
» PhotoShop — The Mom gave me a Scott Kelby book for Christmas and I’ve been making my way through the exercises. They are extremely helpful for digital image rookies like myself. Photoshop no longer feels threatening.
Yes, I am a closet design nerd. There are two books on my desk right now. Joel’s User Interface Design for Programmers and Universal Principles of Design. The first book gives me the impression that I can design user interface and the second book reminds me of how little I know.
I really like the idea of a community of some sort. Whether that be a whole 'nother side and/or a BBS... I am so on board.
Letter-spacing and stealing sheep: http://www.eyewire.com/magazine/columns/robin/blackletter/
Community: You need to devise a fancy comment relation system like Dunstan's, but that presents itself as flowchart you can scroll like GMaps using lots of AJAX and other run-on sentences.
CSS: Isn't it awesome? I couldn't believe how fast I chucked my tables... Now it's time for a redesign with a little more taste. Hello May 1 Reboot!
(you were early)
I am working on a web-based documentation tool that is going to have that sort of flowchart style with scrolling. I started work on an Expose-like feature to smoothly scale boxes of information as you moved further out in the tree. So far that part has been a miserable failure.
In my case, there's going to be a lot of cross-linking between documents, so it makes a bit more sense to use that approach. For a comment/conversation type thing, I'm not sure it would be that useful unless you're specifically going to cross-reference conversations.
The issue of handling multi-threaded complex conversations in weblog comments is quite elegantly tackled by Dunstan at http://www.1976design.com/blog/ . It's a trick I've thought about implimenting in my own blog whenever I redesign. Of course, my implimentation would be nowhere near as elegant.
The web app I base my blog tool on has a nice built in comments system (well, it would be nice if it worked in a consistent manner and provided a management interface). Comments are threaded under the original blog entry a la usenet. I'd like to see a better implementation of the idea.
