blog.macalicious:Errata

Blog.Macalicious Part Frickin’ 3

01 Apr, 2006
Posted at 00.27 PST

Well it’s been nearly a year, but I have finally finished unifying this blog and the main graphics site. I cannot express how inordinately pleased and proud I am of the end result, even if it did take nearly a year to get sufficiently motivated. A minimalist design is something I’ve been striving towards for years, and I finally feel I’ve hit on one that manages to skirt the line between spare and stark. I knew I’d nailed it when I reached the point where I could sit back and admire it without feeling self-conscious about it, if that makes any sense.

It’s been a bit of a learning experience too, as this time I’ve finally began to get a handle on Cascading Style Sheets and how they behave, especially in regards to margins and padding. It wouldn’t have taken this long to wrap my head around CSS, but for the fact that I tackle it only when I revamp the site, so all my hard-won knowledge slowly leaks away between fitful urges of site-tweakage.

I held off unifying the two halves of the site for a long time, in large part due to my ambivalence about having these silly ramblings on display for the whole world to see, especially considering the insane amounts of traffic generated by the graphics half.

The desire to have friends and family easily find the blog finally won out though, and I figure most the people visiting the site are there for the graphics, so I might as well ignore that little voice of doubt. Heh.

And speaking of friends and family, tomorrow morning I’m off to the Olympic Peninsula for the weekend with a group of friends. I’ll try to remember and take lots of pictures. If you haven’t seen this particular corner of the country, you are missing out more than you can imagine. Seattle, the Cascade Mountains, the peninsula, the people—each one alone are worth visiting the Pacific Northwest to experience, much less the aggregate. I have so fallen in love with this area of the country, but more on that in a later post.

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blog.macalicious:Errata

O Brave New Layout

27 Mar, 2006
Posted at 08.07 PST

You know each time I wade into CSS, I feel an overwhelming urge to pull my hair out. It’s not that Cascading Style Sheets are so difficult to grasp, it’s just that so much time goes between my forays into CSS that I have to teach myself how to use them yet again.

It’s enough to chap your ass, you know?

Regardless, I’ve now finally begun unifying my written blog with the layout and apperance of the main graphics site. Some things still don’t work correctly, mainly the permanent links at the bottom of each entry. For whatever reason, they’re failing to make use of the new CSS. Eventually I suppose I’ll figure out why. Fixed.

So why the changes? I was pretty pleased with the old layout afterall. The old one didn’t fit in with the main site’s layout though. It was my first attempt at a page design suitable for blog entries, and I liked it, but it was pretty much a ripoff of a WordPress or Movable Type layout, I don’t remember which. I later took what I learned and rebuilt the graphics end of the site using the same principles, but with my own design sensibilities rather than someone else’s, tweaking the layout to suit my needs better. And that was a design with which I was extremely happy. Happy enough with it that I haven’t bothered with any significant changes in a year and a half, a new record for the site.

I’ve been meaning to backport the design to this blog ever since I finished with the graphics site, but have repeatedly put it off. Mainly this is due to the odd chimerical nature of Macalicious.net. The graphics end is driven by hand coded pages, but the blog is driven by Blosxom, an open-source plug-in based perl script that generates pages on the fly. Marrying up the two halves is something I didn’t have the patience for until recently. My interest in pulling the two halves together has grown though, and so I’ve finally begun the process. Now that I’ve gotten this half up and running I’ll soon propogate the new layout back to the graphics end. That’s gonna be a whole lot of fun, I can tell. Sigh.

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blog.macalicious:Errata

Unification

23 Mar, 2006
Posted at 22.30 PST

Don’t be surprised to see the blog go down, go crazy, look funny, or otherwise be a bit strange. I’m going to soon be attempting to unify the blog and the graphics side of the site. Sigh. It’s gonna be a frickin’ pain in the ass.

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blog.macalicious:Errata

Blog.Macalicious Part 2

30 Oct, 2005
Posted at 17.07 PST

Heh. “Over the course of the next week or two.” Um, not quite. Maybe soon though.

Or Later. Eventually, anyway.

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blog.macalicious:Errata

blog.macalicious

02 Jul, 2005
Posted at 15.05 PDT

Macalicious’ Epistolarium will be moving into this space sometime over the next week or two. I’m attempting to combine this blog with the blog-like commentaries I’ve posted to the graphics site, mainly as a way to archive articles in a similar manner as the graphics are archived, but without interfering with the graphics site proper.

Since f.o.w. is Blosxom-driven, and the main site isn’t, it’s proving to be quite an interesting challenge, not least of which is redesign and recoding of this blog. As such, this site is likely to either be broken or look rather funny for some time as I putter around with layout, CSS, and graphics.

The blog’s layout and design is going to change completely. While I’m not planning to roll it into Macalicious completely, graphics and layout are going to be brought into line with main site’s design flavor.

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