Greetings. Check out the new digs. Technically, this marks the third design of davidblog.com. But wait. There is a new domain. (Well, not totally new, because I’ve owned it since 2003–but certainly new to you… most of you.) So, I decided to ditch davidblog.com. Okay, technically not ditching it, just letting it rest—and send traffic here instead. Not sure what to expect from this little change, except that more folks might now learn my last name or at least assume I started a foundation in my name. Enough with the small talk. Let’s open the hood.
Overall Design Inspiration
To be honest, I can’t say that the inspiration for this design came from one place, but rather a multitude of places that I often visit. The design is certainly trendy with its big midsection, rich typography, icons and contrast. Trendy just means I’ll be redesigning this in six months or so when this all goes out of style. I will say, I love designers like Steve Smith, Veerle, Bryan Veloso, Cederholm, Snook and Nathan Smith. I think they all have a keen eye for smart design and I can always take away something from them. Many of the elements in this design have no doubt been inspired by these folks in some form or fashion. In fact, there are lots of places—even beyond the aforementioned—that I find inspiration. If you see something here that you did first, go ahead—take credit for it.
Icons
I’ve never used icons very much. When I found the Silk icon set from FamFamFam a couple of months ago, it was the kick in the pants that I needed in order to see the light. I hope I didn’t over-do it, but I do hope that over time the icons will help guide you to information more rapidly. I’m certainly a visual person and would look for a symbol over a word any day. So I incorporated a little icon love. Other icons that you see here that aren’t in the silk set were either lovingly crafted by me or stolen from some other site whose owner is probably none the wiser. I felt bad at first, until I realized someone would probably steal mine as well. You might be stealing them right now. Just download Silk. They are better anyway.
Elements
Let’s see… There’s military time and British dates. Nope. It’s not very “accessible” or just plain. Just remember: this is my house. If I want 24hr format and funky dates, then that’s what we all shall have. At least here. 
Unordered lists look nice now.
Yeah, it won’t save the world, but you’ll probably get more lists from me now.
Blockquotes have a nice feel as well. You might leave an incredible comment below which may find fame in one of these little boxes in a future blog entry. Maybe.
There is a little alert bar at the top. Today, it says Welcome to v3!, but it probably won’t say that all the time. For one, it’s a bit cheesy and, for two, I never really meant for you to see that anyway. It’s just left over from my design process. Apologies.
Plugins
Throughout the site, I’m using several plugins—
- Gravatar
- To manage gravatars in the comments section.
- Ma.gnolia
- For the recent Marks in Ma.gnolia list in the green belt. I had to revert to Barry’s older Javascript version because my hosting package is still on PHP4. Barry’s follow-up PHP-driven plugin is quite nice and worked well in my test environment.
- Referrer Spam Bouncer
- Big fan of stats. Not a big fan of referrer spam.
- Feedburner Feed Replacement
- Steve Smith likes stats, too. And this plugin keeps my Feedburner subscriber count up to speed by including those folks subscribing to the WP feed directly. Makes me feel better about myself.
- EmailShroud
- Obfuscates email addresses to prevent spambot harvesting.
- SimpleTags
- Posting Technorati tags is simple with this plugin.
- Simple Recent Comments
- Used in that green thing to show a handful of your recent comments. Unless you are a lurker, in which case your comment won’t appear due to the fact that you don’t comment—which is fine. No, really, it’s fine.
- Search Pages
- Searches pages as well as posts.
- Spam Karma 2 - Reloaded
- This thing is money. Comment spam is no match for the power of Karma.
Midsection
I always loved having the sidebar in the last design, but I never liked keeping information there. I felt like it changed the location of items that needed to stay put. So, I decided to place all the dynamic information in a nice, new green home. Personally, I like this approach because it gives me the freedom to be dynamic without upsetting the fabric of the site navigation. You might hate it. If so, feel free to express your distaste and vow to never visit again. We’ll miss you. (Kidding really—I’m open to criticism and you’re welcome to stay.) It also keeps less important information out of the way. There if you need it, but not if you don’t.
Tools
For the vast majority of testing, I used XAMPP for Windows and created/edited with Notepad++. I used SmartFTP for the live server interaction and opened Dreamweaver for some quick bug fixes once this design was live.
sIFR
In addition to the tools above, I decided to take the leap into rich web typography with sIFR, a font replacement tool driven by Javascript and Flash. Originally conceived by Shaun Inman and further developed by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben, sIFR is a powerful tool that is very much welcome in my web design arsenal. While I’ve known about sIFR for some time, this is the first time I’ve released a live concept using it. I love the accessibility of sIFR. If you have a Flash-enabled browser, you are seeing the rich typography that sIFR is producing. But if you don’t have Flash (or Javascript) enabled, there’s nothing to worry about—you see good old regular web fonts, exactly the way I designed them to look.
CSS
For the CSS, I structured things a bit differently than normal. I decided to use an indention technique I discovered recently at BusinessLogs. It’s not rocket science, but I just had never thought about indenting CSS. So it was an experiment to see how I might like it and I think I do. There are a few things left to clean up in there and I’ll get to that soon.
Validation and Engine
This site validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2 specifications. I love accessibility and I love web standards. This site is powered by WordPress.
Beta
Consider this design to be in the beta stage. There may be a few bugs here and there, and please let me know if you find one or even suspect. I certainly appreciate you looking deeply.
In Conclusion
Enjoy.
Technorati Tags: design, wordpress, redesign, blog, realign, xhtml, css, web standards, w3c, icons, plugins, sifr
