projekt draco

Here goes: I’ve finally (well almost) completed version 4 of my personal homepage in time for CSS Reboot May 1st.

If you’re still seeing green and not shades of grey, hit Refresh till you do. If you’re reading this from feeds, it’s time to pay my site a visit, dude.

Thanks for this event, or else I’ll never be able to get my ass working together enough to put in efforts into this new layout. Now let’s get into the long details.

Sick of previous layout

From my attempt to refurbish the previous layout with different colours you can tell that I’ve heard you people: The site gets boring enough after 18 months.

And then after the attempt, Jun Yaik had to say that the new colours made the site felt dirty.

I lead a very sad life. But though I don’t usually give in to visitors’ demands, somehow I think he was right so I had to do something about it.

Goals attained

Use a different sets of colours

So, this new design is my answer to you people. Since I don’t really have great sense of colour combinations, I have chosen to use shades of black & white instead. And I have exhausted my shades while doing this theme.

Re-organise the folder structures

I have also moved things around so I expect most of the links that don’t relate to WordPress’s posts to break. I believe this is a great move because of a more organised folder structure.

Besides, should anything fail, I’ve also made a new and relatively helpful 404 Error page. Enter any random URL to this site to see it!

Break away from a vertical header-body-footer layout

This time, I try to break away from having a masthead, a top link, the body and then the footer sort of common blog template. Though you may think otherwise of this site layout, it’s breaking that convention because the site is really broken into the left and right columns instead.

Make the home page the most important page

One of the mistakes that needed to be taken care of was that the previous home page was not updated at all and I tend to focus more on the blog section instead. So over time, it became totally secluded from the rest of the site.

So this version, I had put in efforts to make sure the home page does what it should do — let visitors see updates to the other parts of the site in a glance. Now it shows latest blog entries, photographs from Flickr, articles and projects I’m working on, and soon, when the “Selected” section is ready, the home page will also reflect the latest items added in that section. Make no mistake, now all dynamically generated to ensure the information is up to date.

Relevant information about the entire site is also added, to give weight to the main page as a portal-like page to other sections of my personal site. Now the home page should be the most important page.

Use more images

I know the images I used for the navigation and stuffs aren’t impressive to say the least. But it’s a breakthrough from the previous 99% text-layout. And over time when I can gather more time, I’ll be adding little images around to spice things up. We’ll see about this.

HTML/CSS Validation

No, most of the pages won’t validate because of Flickr’s codes and I couldn’t care less. The CSS also won’t validate because I used the invalid but well-formed underscore(_) hacks and I don’t think that killed anyone so here again, I couldn’t care less.

So why the hell do I put that 2 little validation buttons for, you ask? Because validation is important for reasons that I have made great use of, and for one, making sure any CSS breakage isn’t due to invalid HTML.

And this time, I’ve made sure that the HTML elements used are of the best semantics elements for the different sections of the file to the best of my knowledge. No more abusing of fieldset and legend to achieve visual results.

That said, 100% of the problems with the HTML semantics mentioned in v4.0 and some senses had been worked on. I have even updated the HTML codes graffiti spits out in order to more suitable HTML codes.

Easier navigation between blog pages

This time I added “Recent Entries” to the blog pages so visitors can browse in between entries easier. And also navigation to the next or previous post or pages are added for this purpose too. The previous version didn’t allow viewing by pages, but that’s history now.

More mention of XML Feeds

draco.dev’s RSS and Atom feeds are now given a place in the sidebar of blog pages. Previously they weren’t mentioned because at time of design, I hadn’t learnt about such technologies yet. And after I had, I was too lazy to bother so I suspect not many knew about XML feeds from my site.

Now they will.

Goals unattainable

Updates of the many pages

I had planned a rewrite of most pages’ contents (with the exception of articles and projects, of course) to reflect the latest information, mainly the ‘About’ section which I had intended to add alot more information.

But I’ve not given up and in the progress of doing so, just not in time for the Reboot. So we’ll see about this too.

Embrace technologies

I aimed to use Javascript to achieve some real-time results about my online behavior, but that too was delayed because of my nature to procrastinate. I’ll work harder, boss!

Achieve a greater cross-browser design

Much of this is due to the lack of support. First of all, I don’t own a Mac so I can’t test in any Mac browsers except latest versions of Firefox(I reckon Windows versions of Firefox renders the same as Mac versions, no?) and Safari(if screen capture is any sign of accuracy). And if you think that’s a sorry assed excuse, sue me.

Next, I have decided previously to drop support for Win/IE5.x because doing so would be redundant according to my site stats. Support for IE6 has been achieved though IE6 users won’t get to see 100% of what modern browsers users see. And sad to say, some pages are somewhat quirky in IE6, especially the main page. I’ll check it out when I have the time.

And in case you wonder: No, I don’t consider IE6 is not part of modern browsers.

A portfolio

Although most pages that I’ve planned aren’t ready on time, this is one of the most important pages because I need it. And since it’s not ready, I’m just whinin’.

That’s all

I think that’s all about now. If you’ve read this far, kudos to you dude.

And as far as I’m concerned, I understand that it’s impossible to please everyone with every new design. Still, I hope you like this design as much as I enjoyed designing it, and now, looking at it. I simply love this design, really.