CSS Reboot

Update: it seems there are some minor issues with this design across various browsers. I’ll check into them ASAP. I admit I’ve been a lazy cross-browser tester

About the new design

Although I have redesigned this site about three times now, I’ve always kept to a certain theme. Changes in the design and functionality always stayed within certain boundaries, and this rendition of my theme is no different—although it takes a greater step forward than previous iterations did. I’m moving to an even stronger monochromatic colour palette, I’ve dropped the radiating blue and got rid of the flower decorations. All in all I’ve tried to make the page a bit easier on the eye without changing the content all that much.

But the content has changed. Right now there’s no list of recent links, no links to fellow 9rulers and no blogroll. I’m not sure whether this change will be permanent. I am paying more attention to my own content now, giving the user more options to browse the archives or search the site. I now use an extra little list with ‘featured content’ to help readers discover more interesting articles. In the end it should help improve the findability of individual articles rather than the site as a whole.

Also new are article pull-quotes, JavaScript-powered footnotes, improved print stylesheets (although they’re still under construction), improved series-linking, gravatar-enable comments and… advertisements! They’re only displayed on long-enough article pages, though.

About the reboot

So I’ve rebooted the site and now all is back to normal. Alas, no! I had to make quite an effort to reboot today. Despite that the new design is live now the to do-list still sports a lot of tasks. There’s a huge task of editing all previous articles to adapt to the new functions of the new theme, there are most probably a bunch of dead links and there’s a lot of work under the hood to be done if I want to make this a stable theme.

I do want to make this a stable theme, for I now order myself not to redesign this site until May first, 2007. Until then there will only be small, incremental changes. The next couple of days or maybe even weeks will see various fixes here and there, so mind your head.

Interesting reboots

There are a lot of other interesting reboots out there. That’s why there’s the CSS reboot homepage. At the time of writing it’s down, so I’ll point you to the hot stuff when I find it.

• Avalonstar by Bryan Veloso
• Jonathan Snook
• Paul Stamatiou
• Chris J. Davis
• IfElse by Phu Ly
• Broken Kode by Khaled Abou Alfa

Update

• Matt Brett
• [EchoFaith](http://www.echofaith.com/ “Visit echofaith.com) by Jesse J. Anderson