I have been mentioning for awhile that I was planning on giving the site a face lift. It seems I can only stand a layout for about 3-6 months. This has to be the layout with the most images (10 as of this writing), and by far the most work done with CSS positioning. The top three color bars and the text in them took a good 4 hours since Internet Explorer (at least in versions <= 6, version 7 should bring hope) has a broken box model...and yes I know I bitch about this with every revamp. As it is, the top three bars are just a couple of pixels off in IE, but it is close enough that I don't care. Of course, the banner is font dependant, so an incompatible font could mess up the whole works, but I am will (at least right now) to let that slide. Oh, and they are supposed to get cut off on the top and bottom just enough to be noticeable and make you have to do more than a glance over to read it.
Originally, I was not going to have the face on there. I normally don't like to use a lot of images. I have suffered through dial-up connections before, I respect that people are still forced to use them, so I don't want to punish them for coming to my site...well, anymore than I do with my content. I also felt that the side bar was kinda boring on the main page and could use some filler. The addition of the face added its own problems...in IE. I always forget about IE is that it just seems to hate .PNGs. I had originally was using .PNGs for the three slices of my face, but IE kept messing up the slate color and making it darker. I tried a variety of colors before finally breaking down and using .GIFs (I don't hate .GIFs, I just like to support .PNGs.). This is another area where the next version of IE should be better with.
I also made some changes to the core code to help adjust/correct/stylize the layout. You may notice the ugly as hell category select and posts per page boxes are gone. I have hated the looks of them since I first added them, so today I killed them. To compensate for the category box being killed (because I like the idea of categories), I added in a couple of new bang commands to produce a list in either vertical format (see right panel) or a paragraph form. Going with forms, I switched the user comment forms from a tabled layout to a CSS one. Functionally, they are the same, but this lets me adjust the size when I want without having to hard code anything and possibly messing it up on the wife's page. Some of the divs were switched around to facilitate my new design. I sacrificed a small amount of flexibility to do this, but I will probably go back and add more ids and divs to make up for this. While playing in the code, I noticed a couple of areas that could probably be written better, so I might get around to playing with that eventually. It will take several hours of work but it has potential to speed things up a little.
Lastly, I added a new link to the main page to my Gallery page. It is a prebuilt image gallery thing that is provided by our hosts. I liked it, and it has more functionality that I would ever bother getting around to writing, so I am using it. I was originally going to wait until I had all my images moved over to it before kicking the link up, but that may be forever, and I stopped caring about waiting. The only thing I don't like about it is the lack of an intelligent comment system. I like being able to see all the recent comments on the main page, that is why I wrote rantfest to have them there. But using a third party setup that would not have been possible. Oh, and going with images, I started using some random web buttons on the bottom of the side bar. I will probably add more of these as time goes on...I am just hoping I don't get too addicted to the idea and go absolutely crazy with them.
