Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Time for a redesign!

I chose the design over at Tech Knack from the default blogger themes...a looong time ago (or so it seems)! Since then, I've taken a usability course in school, read many things on the web concerning usability, and been active at Deviant Art.

I believe it is time for a fresh look :D

And this is the testing grounds ;)

One of the things I've heard recently is that white text on dark backgrounds is not all that usable. Cool, but not usable. As I've gone back and read a couple of my posts, I've realized that it's true, especially for long blocks of text; the text just seems to fade into the background after a rather short amount of time.

Another issue I've had is clutter; the more I look at my blog, the more clutter I see. Whitespace is good; simpler is better. Keep it simple, stupid.

In my search for templates for the new Blogger, I've found but one that I really like: Azul by karan at Skins4Bogger. Unfortunately, the XML download is for a completely different theme...

As per usual, I appreciate any and all feedback. What do you expect to see in a blog's layout? Where do you expect to see these things? Should the comment count be before the post, or after? Etc :)

Testing elements: // Multiline code $ sudo rm -rf / // oops... So far down it scrolls! Edit: Added some JS code that *enhances* <code> blocks. Go ahead, click the code; three-click-copyable (left-click to select, right-click for context menu, select "copy"). Then click outside the code, and it'll go back to normal. You can also edit the code but it'll stay put in the highlightable text (until you refresh, that is!) A code block with only one line of code...

"Block quotes."

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