The run up to Christmas, Christmas itself and the aftermath have been a great big sticky pudding mix of socials, late night working sprees and over indulgence, and not really in that order.
You may also have noticed that things have changed here a bit.
The first thing to note is the reason that I haven’t posted for ages, probably the longest I’ve left it while still in the country, is that this website is no longer at it’s old slash-blog location. Although all the links still work, I’m now floating ‘Just Beyond The Bridge’ over on it’s own domain making it well and truly standalone.
AndyHiggs.co.uk may get it’s own blog back eventually as a different type of beast, but for all the usual stuff you now come here. Feed-reader users fear not, due to the wonder’s of feedburner you won’t notice a thing, except you now get all those photos too…
In more technical detail, what I’ve done is shifted everything that was on my old TextPattern installation over to ExpressionEngine. Well, you can never jump on a bandwagon too quickly I think, but of course it’s much better to arrive fashionably late.
I’m not entirely convinced by everything yet, although it does appear pretty flexible and have some nice facets; this is an exploration of the package as much as anything else, so bear with me while I bang around with the code, iron out the glitches and clean up the somewhat shabby code in places. There are some encoding issues I’ve discovered (where ‘Bent?’ read ‘BentÅ’ for example) and maybe a few articles that don’t quite map as before. If you spot anything glaring, comments will be gratefully accepted below.
Rather surprisingly the Internet Explorer 6 hacks file was the smallest I’ve ever made for a site this size, but admittedly they don’t get all the opacity fun that you do on the full fat version. There is some jQuery image resize shizzle going on too for those of you viewing this on a GameBoy sized screen… it should look good down to quite small (give it a go if you like).
Design-wise, it’s no classic, but I wanted to get my photography back in here and hence at the moment (December 2007) you can see a panoramic view from the Tibetan plateau (taken on my last big excursion).
As I say, work in progress, but feel free to chip in, after all, you’re the ones that have to look at it.
One again we seem to be of similar minds. I’m looking to move or adapt LloydyWeb, and run a second blog at paulrobertlloyd.com that is more professionally focused. I also thought about dabbling with EE, but bottled it!
So as to your design - I love it! To be fair, I think most of the heavy lifting is being done that marvellous image. I think a big design trend for next year is big images as backgrounds, particularly with faster connections, and I think the web wil be a better place for it.
As Mr. Roobottom will concur, I can’t let a friends redesign go by without my critique:
- Images in the left column don’t seem to be showing up (so wonder how they will change he design)
- Not sure about the white lines below each post/section. The opaque break should probably be enough.
- The footer seems to lack the same level of polish and/or simplicity of the rest of the design - it feels very rough and ready.
- The graphic buttons for comments, and feeds don’t seem to match the design either.
But aside from those comments, I really do love it! Congratulations!