Realign, or let's say a warm reboot

Sunday May 7 2006

Unless you're suffering from impaired vision you'll probably notice some changes on this website. I figured right now would be the best time to do what I've always wanted to do to this website: actually finish it! I'll be relocating to Sweden in two months and after that I don't think I'll have much time to work on this site's design because a truckload of more important and more exciting things are coming up. Therefore I decided to perform what I call a 'warm reboot' this very weekend, while I still have time.

The design you're currently looking at has received quite a lot of praise since I launched it. People have even tried to steal it or copy it. While I'm still very happy with the general look I felt some parts were a bit rough on the edges. The main page with the pseudo-transparency and the tabbed navigation on the right are the key assets that make this site look cool. Obviously I didn't touch any of those! Let's have a look at what I did change, and why.

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Headings

The headings used to look rather bland. A lot of people didn't appreciate the way I displayed the date either. This is why the article headings received a full overhaul. They now much more blend into the design and I've added a nifty tab thingy to get to the metadata. This means I don't need that stuff below the article anymore. A nice reduction in the amount of clutter.

Comments

There's not so much to say about this I think. I just didn't like the look of my comments yet, which is why I redesigned them.

Comment form

The comment form used to be in the footer. While it looked kinda nice it wasn't a very wise thing to do, interface-wise. The comment form should be below the posting and not detached from it like it used to be. This is why I took it out of the footer and placed a newly designed contact form right below the entry.

The footer

The footer... oh yeah! I gave the page footer a full overhaul. It now looks the same on all pages because I took out the commentform and the trackback section which used to be taking up all footer space on entry pages. Secondly, because I expect to shoot a LOT of photos in the near future I decided to re-introduce the flickr images. Finally it was about time to honor my Fellow 9rulers by adding them to the footer as well. The 9rules Network is the most awesome community on the internet and I'm still extremely happy and proud to be part of it!

Miscellaneous

Besides a revamped face, this site is now running Pivot 1.3RC2 which now includes big parts of my Pivot Blacklist efforts. This means I'm actually going to declare it 'dead' once Pivot 1.3 has been released. It served a a lot of people very well for almost two years and most concepts I originally implemented in it have been adopted by the Pivot crew. It resulted in a release which might very well be one of the most spam-proof solutions on the planet. Kudo's to Bob, Hans and the rest of the crew

Back to the design

I guess this is it. The Net is Dead has successfully gone through a 'warm '. I hope you'll appreciate the changes and improvements. I'm sure there'll be some issues left. By all means do contact me if you spot something that doesn't look right on this site! And, I'd like to finish this post by reporting that no gradients or rounded corners were used nor harmed during the production of this design!

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