super-cooper

Well, I’ve been working on this overhaul since last year, probably late summer actually. I have been close to done for quite a while now, but this weekend I had some time, so I decided that, by God, I was going to launch this already. My objective was simplicity both in looks and functionality. I wanted things clean and uncluttered, quick and easy. It’s just that it wasn’t so easy to do. Basically, upgrading my WordPress install in the future is going to be next to impossible. I hacked up the template a ton and a bunch of core code too. But as of now, I don’t see upgrading my WP install as a priority.

So what did I do?

Main page: I wanted this to be very simple, yet present everything logically. Also, I wanted a section for little snippets of info that are interesting, but don’t really warrant a full post. So I made the “Interesting” section in the right column. I separated the Interesting stuff from all other posts by employing Kitten’s Show Categories plugin. It isn’t the easiest thing to set up, and I think there is a small performance hit from it (due to some logic), but it gets the job done nicely. I’m working on a feed for the Interesting posts, by the way.

Archives: I never cared for the default WordPress archives design. It’s pretty lame and really doesn’t it make it very easy to dig through old posts. So I used a combination of Dunstan’s archive code and Nick Momrick’s WP Archives hack to get it done. I’m pretty pleased with the way the Archives turned out.

Commenting: I had some major CSS issues in IE with the comments during the redesign, but I got them worked out. I added Chris J. Davis’ Live Comment Preview plugin, which works well, except I can’t get the blockquote quicktag to work on the live preview. Oh well.

Gallery: Paul Griffin has version 1.1 of his Simple PHP Gallery out now. I thought 1.0 was nice, but man, 1.1 is great. GD Library does all the work for resizing, plus there are many other new features, such as outputting the number of works in the folders and custom folder/file aliases. And installation, why it’s a breeze.

The look: This really didn’t change that much. Still mostly grey and white, still 2-column with header and footer. Pretty basic, but it works for what I wanted to do. I decided to keep the header image (I just love the perspective of the water coming right out at eye level), I just softened it up a bit. As long as it took me to do this, I don’t think I’ll be changing the design anytime soon either.

What’s left?

For starters, I’m pretty sure this site looks like crap in IE5.5 Win, and I need to address that. It looks good in Firefox, IE6, and Safari, so that’s just about good enough for me. Oh yeah, and everything but the Contact page should validate as XHTML 1.0 transitional, which still surprises the hell outta me. The CSS validates also.

That’s about it. So, what do you think?