Nortypig Template and CSS Rebuild
Over the last few day’s I’ve scraped together the time to upload a redesign of Nortypig to the server. The original Pigpen, which is now defunct but was in its time popular, used to offer up links to articles I come across which might be useful to web designers out there. Topics that might get put up there are as diverse as web standards, accessibility, usability, interface design, information architecture, Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), markup tutorials, programming, art and design, photography, illustration, business, marketing… and the list goes on. Sometimes its just something kind of funny I’d like to share.
So Nortypig, the newer iteration of what used to be my Pigpen, is something probably worth keeping track of with your Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Reader. I’m assuming a whole lot here about you understanding RSS and how to go about the process. If you don’t there are plenty of information sources to guide you. Or, you might simply want to go back to Nortypig every other day and see what’s updated. Sometimes it can be only a post a day I put up there. On Pigpen the most in a day was about 30 posts. It depends on what I’m up to and how much something is worth sharing.
The improvements to Nortypig are in the way that I edited the Wordpress theme templates and then rewrote the stylesheets from the ground up. As opposed to doing a quick and dirty rewrite of the default template, for example. So with a global reset the CSS is now lean and easily edited instead of convoluted and increasingly desperate. Also, being a links blog, its essentially about as basic a 2 column floated layout as you’ll find. The objective is simply that you can differentiate posts from one another and that’s mostly achieved by using the underline on titles. The site is accessible, usable and aesthetically pleasing (especially if you happen to have Helvetica on your local computer - yeh I know that’s a designer only thing).
There are the normal still to do’s over the weekend including print stylesheets, skip links and other spit and polish but overall its done. Next stop seems to be a rewrite of an old job I did for someone in the United Kingdom last year and hopefully a rewrite of this blog as soon as possible. Prowl this site and you may notice a few anomolies in how I did a quick and dirty implant of two other Wordpresses for photography and drawing. The content rich footers will need looking into. But yep the same story of re-editing the templates and rewriting the CSS from scratch. Its actually faster in the long run.
So if you get a chance to stroll by Nortypig you might find some great links. I come by so many during the average day that I couldn’t possible read them all let alone post them on the web. Its just the best of what floats past…
… and if you have a penchant to learn more about designing, developing and running websites - Boagworld is a weekly podcast from the United Kingdom that you may want to subscribe to. Highly recommended. There are also 113 (to date) podcasts. This week’s is titled Hiring.
On show 113: Christian Heilmann on common Javascript mistakes. Marcus talks about hiring new staff and Paul shares his journey into screencasting.
March 1st, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Great work with the Nortypig update Steven - nice one!
I’ve got an rss feed from Digg plumbed in to my site (on the main index page) - and the cheeky monkeys screwed with the Javascript file at their end recently, so the version on my site wasn’t working properly! I’ve amended it now with a revised version of the same feed (but it looks messy as it is un-styled just now…*sigh*) - it is only a temporary measure as the new version of my site will be out in the near future anyway.
March 1st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Hi Matt, thanks. Simple and professional was the design brief (from me)…
Yes I see what you mean about your Digg feed. I had a similar problem with Google Search a few years ago, still don’t know how long the search didn’t work for before I stumbled across it. Is there a Digg dev blog that is meant to keep you updated or is it just grab the code and hope they support it?
Temporary measures are fine… cleaners tend to have dirty houses, builders live in houses that are falling down and we tend to have websites that blow up in our faces lol… ahh its the fun of it all.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:05 pm
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