The Secret Is Out

So I’m a little late.

Who cares? The secret is finally out.

I promised 7 days, but it took a little longer. In reality, this redesign has been a few weeks in the making, and I’ve been working on different concepts for at least a couple of months. As is the case with any thing I start doing, I really had to push myself to finish it. If there’s ever been a time that I’ve been proud of a page that I’ve made, now is the time.

[ego trip ends here]

So, what’s new? Here’s a quick rundown:

New Layout

That is most likely the first thing you will notice. The previous layout that I had was created in a couple of hours, just to throw something together. Little thought was put into it, and none of the pages (archives, etc.) actually worked. It was basically just a front page with a bunch of posts. That’s now changed.

A Usable Sidebar

The previous sidebar was just a couple of links to close friends. The new sidebar is going to take on a completely different role. Although “Latest Entries” and “Regularly Linked” have fairly obvious functions, “Daily Links” is something I’ve been meaning to implement for a long time. There are alot of times that I run across things on the web that I find interesting and would like to share with all my (two) readers. On a regular basis, I’ll be posting links to various random things. You can comment on them too.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

Probably the coolest thing to hit the web since Flash itself. sIFR allows for complete control of typography, regardless of what fonts are installed on a user’s computer. The headlines for the posts all use sIFR. It’s something that you can use only sparingly (headlines and such), but that has fantastic results. It replaces the headline area with a Flash movie of the text that I want to display, except in the font that I want. This is done by embedding the font in the Flash file, and using JavaScript to replace the text. If you didn’t understand anything I just said, that’s completely okay.

Colors!

It’s not just pink anymore. Blue, silver, and a hot purplish pink is the way to go this time around.

Comment Preview

Comment preview gives you a live preview of what your comment will look like when it’s actually posted. It’s all done using Javascript. Pretty cool, huh?

Contact Page

Well most of you already know how to get in touch with me, but in case you’d like to send a quick email to me to say hello, please do.

About Page

Not done yet, but it’s in the making. That’s going to be a tough one. How can you talk about yourself without sounding like you’re full of it?

XHTML Strict

All the pages that I created (in other words, not the photos section) are XHTML strict valid. The CSS is valid, too!

I’d like to integrate the photo gallery to look like the rest of the site, but that’s going to be a time consuming task that I will leave for later. Other then that, comments on the new look would be greatly appreciated.