Beta testing the site redesign

If you’re reading this post on the site itself (as opposed to in a reader) you’ll notice some site redesign has taken place. If you’re reading this in a reader, click the link already and come visit the site itself.

I’m calling it a beta because I’m sure we’ll find more things I want to fix, but it’s time for other people to take a look at it. Any comments on the new theme? Things you like/don’t like? Things that don’t make sense? Things that are missing? Bugs in the operation? Leave a comment below and let me know. Thanks!

Hey man! Good work! I like the dark look.

Got some nit-picky details, but figured I’d throw them at you anyways.

There are a few little visual details with IE8 - such as the dotted line underneath some links (the ‘.story h3 a’ elements). They look ok in IE7. I noticed you hadn’t added the new IE X-UA-Compatible tag. (Details on this can be found here).

But simply put, if you add this to the <head> section, IE8 (and future versions of IE) will render exactly like IE7:

Also, IE has issues with Opacity, so when “HOME” is highlighted the background is black instead of just being darkened. Off the top of my head I don’t remember how to fix this.

Firefox has some issues (GASP!) in the “Follow AndrewOsenga.net” section. When you hover over the link, the underlin extends to go under the icons as well (instead of just underlining the text). I think the best way to fix this is to remove the <img> tag from inside the <a> tag and make it a background image for the link instead. Then if you set the link to display: block and padding-left: 25px (or so), it should look the same (with the icon to the left of the text) and you’ll still be able to click the icon to activate the link.

In Opera the “Songs” section isn’t floating underneath the “Discography” section like it is in IE/FF. Don’t know why (don’t have time to figure it out).

The navigation bar has a strange mix of font faces (see the css font-family attribute for “#navigation ul”). Some of them are Serif fonts and some are Sans-serif. Just means that on systems that don’t have the default “Lucida Sans” font (like my Ubuntu box) the nav text looks dramatically different. Again, nitpicky detail.

On all systems, when you grow/shrink text, the size of the black navigation link highlighting doesn’t always fill the orange row, so you get an orange stripe below the black box sometimes.

It would be cool if the header where it says “Andrew Osenga.net” was a link to the home page (maybe more of a preference than a hard-and-fast rule though).

Also, would be cool to be able to preview comments.

Heh, guess I had a lot of little details. Hope it doesn’t sound critical, because I really do like the new look and feel. Well done, amigo!

-matt

Matt 05.20.08 / 1:20 pm

Chris Hubbs 05.20.08 / 1:23 pm

Matt,

Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks much. I’ve been a bit of a bad developer here; to date I’ve tested it on exactly one platform: Firefox on my Win XP laptop. I’ll stress test it some more over the next few days. And good call on the comment preview. I’ll see what i can dig up… surely there’s a WP plugin for that…

–CJH

Geof F. Morris 05.20.08 / 8:31 pm

Me, I just like the photo.

Chris Hubbs 05.21.08 / 8:19 am

Yeah, Geof, you’re easy. But thanks for a great photo to use.

Geof F. Morris 05.21.08 / 8:29 pm

That’s what she said!

Sharon 05.25.08 / 4:03 am

What a cool surprise when I clicked on my bookmark and this opened. It looks great!

Joseph 05.29.08 / 3:20 pm

Very dark, sleek and cool. Great job.

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