About once a year, I get the urge to refresh the look of things around here. The current incarnation of the tumbledry visual identity has stuck around for over a year, which is not common. But, once again, I am getting the urge to redesign. What would you all like to see? I do not know if I will go fixed width or liquid, image heavy or minimalist (probably the former). Regardless, I would like to lighten things up with a more inspiring color scheme, but keep our mascot (Largent the monkey) in some way, shape, or form.
If you can read this, then tumbledry has successfully and completely been moved to it’s new home on Justin’s server at the datacenter in Minneapolis. Alternatively, you may have somehow determined the testing IP address we used and then wandered here in search of the freshest tumbledry you could fine. Finally, if you do not speak English, you may be able to see this but not be able to read it. If this last category does apply to you, I am sorry, but I do hope you enjoy these foreign strings of characters snugly nestled in a standards-compliant design.
What you are looking at is not a finished product. Indeed, the design of this site is standards compatible, fairly well structured, and CSS based. Despite this, there are some major flaws. Please allow me to elaborate.
Use of Space
Horizontally, tumbledry v12.2 is a very efficient beast, comfortable fitting all horizontal content into a 800 x 600 monitor space. Vertically, however, it runs into problems. Notice the header. It does an excellent job of establishing the identity of the site, but does so at the cost of some very valuable space. The area where Content would normally live is filled with an empty yellow box as this site loads on a dial-up connection. If I am going to deliver what people come here for (to read), then I will have to reduce the massive billboard header and establish the identity another way. Next, you may have noticed the lists for quotes, links, inspirations (pretty much anything) waste copious amounts of space. This should be remedied by forming a double liquid column that flows down the page. Side by side, the headings will use half as much space and look better to boot. Finally, navigation is currently horizontally oriented and thus limited to a set number of sections. Navigation should be made vertical to stretch and change with the site over time. That brings us to the next point.
Justin and I talked about a bunch of things today. I don’t know if we are the type to sit down to coffee (or something similar, I don’t really like caffeine) and shoot the breeze/chit-chat/catch-up for hours. Maybe we are. Either way, when we have something to work on, we communicate quite well and naturally. Today we helped me out a lot by faxing the ISSN registration papers (20 to 30 business days to process…wow), registering tumbledry.org, examining the options at alterahosting.com, and mod_rewriting. About mod_rewrite: it’s unbelievable! The ability to secure a site through regular expression pattern matching and subsequent spitting outage of a Forbidden page is wonderful. So here I am, slowly coding and re-coding, checking and re-checking some mod_rewrite code so we can submit it and have it added to the VirtualHost (which we can’t do very often, it isn’t an automatic feature). I consider myself greatly blessed to be able to add mod_rewrite rules to the VirtualHost without possessing a dedicated server.