Check out my new digs. I’ve been working on this redesign for about a week now. I’m sure there will be bugs for me to fix and I still have about 3 years of old posts to update but I think the vast majority of the work is done. I’ve been inspired over the last few months from attending Design4Drupal in Boston, working with Jen and reading (at her suggestion) Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm. So this site doesn’t look exactly the same in all browsers. I’m using some fancy CSS3 stuff so if you’re using IE8 or IE7 you won’t see rounded corners and shadows anywhere. And if you are using IE6 you’ll see a completely unstyled site! I just can’t waste any more of my time making things work in IE6.
I also wanted to get away from all the special video apparatus I had installed over the years. I’ve always hated feeling like I’m at the mercy of whoever is maintaining my plugins. I’ve decided to go with just the blip.tv player all over the place. It makes a super simple and, I think, effective solution. It also fits right in with my workflow since I’m already hosting the videos there. I just copy and paste the embed code in my post and wrap it in div with a style on it. Piece of cake. [Nov 2009] So now I’ve begun implementing the HTML5 video tag along with Ogg Theora video. The one stumbling point was the lack of poster image support but I finally sat down and figured out how to write a tiny bit of javascript to swap out an image with the video when you click it. It’s not the super simple solution that HTML5 promises, but I wanted to get started with it rather than wait around for everyone to support all the features of the new spec. And I can drop the embed code into the “excerpt” section and use them to make these cool archive pages.
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6 Comments
Very nice Michael. I really like the redesign
Nice site, I am with you, I am redoing my site with Blip as well, tired of playing around with it all….and, well I gotta save something for my own coming out post!
by the way, how did you make the archives? very cool..
Thanks guys.
Heath,
Wordpress’ theme system allows you to have different templates for different categories. All you do is duplicate the category.php file and name it (in this case because “video” is category #2) category-2.php. Then you customize it. For this site I basically stripped everything out but the title of the post and instead of using the full post I told it to use the excerpt. So when I make a video post I copy the embed code into the excerpt box. The rest is all done with CSS. If you use Firefox, get the firebug plugin and you can easily poke around and see how it works.
Thanks Michael, I will have to get that plugin and do a bit of looking around…
Oh and btw I just love how your site looks like in IE6….lol I am at work right now and we have to use IE6, it’s painful man, just painful….too funny..
Really like the new design, think you’ve chosen some unique colours that are you’re own.
Just curious, why have you decided to veer away from wordpress onto drupal (as a non-dedicated WP user)?
I know what you mean with he video plugins, i’ve disabled them in favour of coding a set-up myself.
Krystian, the big thing about Drupal is that it can be anything you want it to be. Wordpress can be more than a blog but the farther away you take it the harder it gets. Drupal is more of a framework.
This site is a blog with hundreds of posts and thousands of comments. It works great on Wordpress so I’ve got no desire to switch. On the other hand I’m working on a Drupal site for archiving all of my projects. That seems much easier to do in Drupal. The nice thing is it’s fairly simple to reuse the css and make both sites look the same.