Mocking Up
Wed, 06 Jun 2007.
So, like I said, this design ain’t working.
And I thought, what about a two-column design? I like the links that I post and I’d hate for them to be ignored so they should have a prominent position. Plus there are a lot of them so they’ll take up a lot of space. On the flip side, my own written blog posts are important too; they don’t get updated that often but they are generally pretty lengthy.
So I thought about a two-column design where the columns are the same size. One column would display my blog posts and the other displays my links.
Step 1: New blank Wordpress theme
I made a copy of the default Wordpress theme and deleted all the CSS. Then I moved the sidebar to the top of the page.
Step 2: Setup some columns
Using an ugly ob_start() kludge, I filtered out the links into a second column. Then I wrote some CSS to the columns were at 50% width and floated next to one another. I also resized some images so they wouldn’t break the layout.
Step 3: Install Sideblog Plugin
Removed my kludge and went looking for a proper Wordpress plugin to extract out the link posts. There are various technical reasons why you don’t want to use the hack I did, the big one is that if your front page is set to display 10 posts and 8 of them are links then the page ends up being lop-sided.
I managed to find Sideblog, the answer to my prayers.
Step 4: Play with color
After I got the layout in a “good enough” state, I decided to play with color and set the mood.
Here’s some blue:
Earthy green and brown:
Grey and black:
I have to say that this last one is probably what I’ll use. As much as I try to run away from bland greys, it’s still my favourite.
All of this took me about 2 and a half hours to do because I was chatting with people and reading some blogs on the side. The remaining of creating the design will probably take around 8 - 16 hours as all the spacing, color and styles are fleshed out. Plus I have to style comments and archives and chat, etc. Yikes.
So much jargon that I don’t understand! But I like the Grey Black.
Jargon is fun! Makes you seem smart and gives you license to charge more.
bring back the previous one!
Sorry Fubes, no can do. We stay the course here and keep moving towards progress.
but you broke it!, the old adage is true, “if its not broken, don’t fix it”.
“We stay the course here and keep moving towards progress.” what the hell?
Ergh. I was being ironic. Thanks for making me explain myself.
Actually, I really like the layout. I’m getting tired of my own (hijacked Connections about a year ago, been cobbling additions on top of it since) and I think it’s about time to program me some CSS. I like your comments and search box in particular.
Aha!
Zac is my new favorite person. :)