Helvensteijn.com

Last Monday early in the morning, my sister gave birth to a daughter, making me become uncle for the first time. The child has been given the name Janna, and on birth she weighed 3140 grams and measured 48 centimeters. I’m not exactly an expert in these things, but according to both her mother and her grandmother, she’s a beautiful newborn. I guess that figures.

Well, it’s a nice child. She doesn’t cry very much (yet), she mostly sleeps. And I can’t say I blame her. What would you do? Haven’t held her in my arms, and not planning to either. I like newborns just fine, as long as they’re not mine and I don’t have to hold them.

I’ve made a few small tweaks to my new design. There are always some things that don’t exactly work as planned, things still needing to be worked out, and things that simply came up along the way.

First of all, there was nothing to open full-size images in-page for thumbnails, they just behaved like normal links. I formerly used Lightbox for that, but was never really happy with it. Fiddled around somewhat with other implementations, and ended up using Shadowbox on this web site from now on.

Then, I recreated the Files section — which now makes use of Shadowbox for images and movies — and the font-size adjustment — which can now be found to the right of the main menu.

Also, since the fixes for Internet Explorer require JavaScript to be enabled anyway, I decided JavaScript could just as well handle the loading of said fixes. So I removed the conditional comment (nasty thing ) from the HTML.

And lastly, I didn’t particularly like the gray background, but hadn’t decided yet what to do with it. As you can see, I have now.

Yes, it’s finally finished (I think), so a few minutes ago, I took my new theme online, the third one in about 16 months. I call it TWAIN, or Theme Without An Interesting Name in full. If you own a scanner, you’ll probably know where I got my inspiration for that.

So, besides the looks, what’s new? Well, if everything went as I hoped, nothing really. I already made the necessary changes two and a half weeks ago.

I have tested the design in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and everything works there, except for some minor bugs with IE7 (complaining of JavaScript errors, but everything seems to work). Firefox 2, Opera 9.x and Safari 2 will probably work fine for the most part, but Internet Explorer 6 is explicitly not supported. If you’re still using that browser, you really, really ought to upgrade to at least IE7! Even better would be switching to a decent browser altogether — like one of those mentioned above.

One more thing to mention is the width of the site, and thus the minimum required width of the browser window to prevent horizontal scroll bars. Until now, I always kept my designs confined to within 800 pixels, or I used a fluid design. But a fluid design is tougher to get right, especially in combination with rounded corners.

The statistics for this site tell me that practically nobody uses such low resolutions anymore. That might change a bit with these mini notebooks that are becoming increasingly popular lately, but still I decided to go a step further and based the layout on a browser window of at least 1024 pixels wide. That requirement is met by over 95% of the visitors to this site.

Well, I’d say try it out, and if you encounter any problems, you can leave a reply below, or contact me directly.