Helvensteijn.com

On my home served web site, raptor’s playground, I’ve hidden an easter egg. Find it, and you’ll earn eternal fame (and your name listed on the home page).

Today, in San Francisco an event called “Lights Out San Francisco” takes place. Basically, everyone there is asked to turn off al their lights except for one compact fluorescent lamp between 20:00 and 21:00 hours tonight, to raise awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption.

Google supports this initiative by serving a black home page to people living in the San Francisco Bay area.

Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.

http://www.google.com/lightsoutsf/

Well, I don’t live anywhere near San Francisco, but I am treated with a (rather ugly) black Google home page:

Google front page when the lights are out

So far nothing really special. But apparently, everyone else I’ve asked gets the standard white home page. I haven’t pulled off any tricks, I’m not connecting though a proxy, and my IP address is a Dutch one. In fact, Google redirects me to www.google.nl when I visit www.google.com if I don’t turn that off manually (by visiting www.google.com/ncr once). So Google actually knows my IP address is a Dutch one. Everyone else with a Dutch IP seems to get the white home page.

Weird.

:-)

I know, this deserves some explanation.
Today is the 25th birthday of the :-). I stumbled upon that page a while ago, remembered it just now, and was fortunate enough to find it in my browser history.
I just thougt it was worth a little remembrance, because I use smilies all too often.
And something of a whole different matter: users can comment without registration again. I got myself an Akismet API key (why haven’t I done that sooner? ) so spam should no longer be a big issue.

Since the launch of this web site, I used a theme based on WP-Andreas01.

Back then, I said that I probably wouldn’t be designing anymore themes myself, mostly because of MSIE. But you know how these things go, it started tinkling again.

So I came up with the idea to base a layout on the “graphite” look of Mac OS X Tiger. The result is a completely rewritten theme. Some basic elements have made it into this new theme virtually unchanged, so those will look familiar if you’ve visited this site before.

The most notable changes are the header — which lost its bulky image — and the menu — which is now horizontal instead of vertical, leaving some more horizontal space for real content.

Below a comparison between the old layout and the new one:

Old layout

New layout

Personally, I think this new layout looks really clean, which is exactly how I like layouts. If you have any comments or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

A few days ago, I noticed that Google’s front page has had a facelift. Upon futher examining this, it seems than only google.com has been updated. Localized Google front pages (like google.nl or google.be) seem to still use the old layout.

For those using a localized version of Google, this is what google.com looks like now:”

Google front page

Or you could go to google.com/ncr to see it yourself (this link prevents redirecting to your localized Google version).