Phew!!! .. Yes Phew. Its the first word that i chose to start the first post of the new year. Well technically new year was almost a month ago, still from the ‘first post of the year’ point of view, its still new year. Oh crap, that line was awfully jumbled up. Hey but i dont mind that line being like that, i dont want to read through that line again and then rephrase it and make it more vivid. No i dont want to do that.
So what happened? I took my blog to the drawing board. 25th Dec ’08 christmas eve, i decide to redesign this blog. Though the previous design was very simple and required less than 3-4 hrs to come up with, this one took nearly 4 weeks. Shit! that was like a month.
Made a sketch of it on paper, then to photoshop, then back to the layout on paper, back to photoshop. I designed one layout and when i looked at the finished one, i almost puked. Then redesigned the whole thing and here it is the new look.
On paper this is how the design looked like
Then i decided to have the sidebar to the right. The first version on Photoshop looked like this and i hated it
Then i struck the right note with this one.
Then it was the wrestle with stylesheets and upgrading the then current SIM3.0 to this one,which i call SIM4.0. Lets talk about the changes,
1. Latest Twitter updates on the header – i basically took the HTML badge given by twitter and put the code there.
2. Sidebar will now sport the pages with a logo for each. I disabled the widget functionality of the sidebar.
3. The Footer -This is where most of the work went into. I mutated the footer to have 3 columns. Into these columns i can add the widgets. It was quite simple infact once i figured that out.
The main footer file is – footer.php. Each of the 3 columns are again separate php file. The main footer.php calls these files like this -
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/1-footer.php'); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/2-footer.php'); ?>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/3-footer.php'); ?>
to make each of these accept widgets, this line was added -
<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar(3) ) : else : ?>
The ‘dynamic_sidebar(3)’ made it sidebar-3 in the add widgets page. It was joy when i figured this out. I know i could have referred the WordPress manuals. But then i wont get the joy of discovering things.
4. My CSS is split into two. Why? One for all the browsers and one for IE. I officially label IE as a pain. This is what i observed. An image was to the left in Firefox, but to the right in IE. “margin-left:100px” put something in the middle for Firefox and at the page boundary in Internet Explorer
Any way after all that pain, now i have the site up with the new look and it feels GREAT!!!
Happy New Year Guys…
- xxx Jerry -