Tag: design

Well, the redesign to Richy’s Random Ramblings is now up and active! What do you think?

Apart from the CSS and HTML changes (including making the content come before the HTML and getting the CSS and HTML to validate), I’ve also made a number of back end changes so the system should “slide” onto the new server without problems (there’s a change of directory structure from “Richy’s Personal Preference” to “Cpanel’s enforced Preference”: and it’s a lot easier for me to work around Cpanel then vice versa).

I’ve only updated the index template and the individual entry templates so far: all the category/archive ones are currently corrupted until I get around to them – but let me know if you spot any problems so I can address them now (leaving details of which browser you are using is helpful as well!).

You may have noticed a very slight change in the look of Richy’s Random Ramblings today: that’s because I’ve been doing some “behind the scenes tinkering” to get the page to load a bit faster (all the graphics, CSS and Javascript now come down to a total of 40Kb: down from nearly 48Kb).

How did I do the file size reduction? Well, apart from removing the calendar (as Neil noticed, it does add a hefty lump to the HTML mark up and doesn’t really add anything to the page), I’ve also dumped Overlib (which I was using before) and decided to go using the “W3C” recommended “acronym tag”. I hadn’t really thought about using it before as I was worried about “how will people know that they can mouse-over to get details” – but then I came across this entry and it reminded me of the magic of CSS… So I’m using that instead and may even add a few more acronym explanations as I go on (once I stop typing acronymn instead of acronym). That alone allowed me to dump a large portion of my Javascript file!

Why the reduction? Hmm – I just felt pity for “narrowband” (modem) users, that’s all. It’s nowt to do with disc space (I’ve got 20Gb) or bandwidth (I’ve currently got 40Gb/month allocation and I’m seriously considering going for a 700Gb/month option as it’s cheaper(!)), but just fancied a little bit of “play code editing” instead of the serious code editing stuff.