Helvensteijn.com

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.

I’ve added a feature to this site for those with reduced visual acuity. One can now make the text on this site larger if so desired.

In the upper right corner, there are two A’s in a small box. Clicking on the larger one makes the text on this site larger. Clicking on the smaller one changes it back to normal. A decent browser with JavaScript support will even apply the change on the fly, without a page reload.

Of course, your preference will be remembered throughout this site, even across multiple visits. Your browser must accept cookies though.

Update August 16, 2008: In the new theme, there’s a link to the right of the main menu which will increase or decrease the font size.

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.

Now that I have ample time available, I’ve looked at some issues that I still had with this web site.

First of all, the page navigation on the left was somewhat buggy. When one was somewhere inside the blog, the “Blog” item in the menu would not be highlighted. That’s been fixed.

Secondly, the page titles were inconsistent. Static pages were OK, but in the blog, somtimes there was a page title (when inside archives or posts), but for example on the main blog page, it simply said “helvensteijn.com”, without any page title. Not very nice. Now, whenever one is somewhere inside the blog, the title will reflect that correctly. On the main blog page, it now sais “helvensteijn.com » Blog” and deeper inside the blog, it will tell you where you are.

The third issue was that one could not post any comment while logged in. Since I’m the only user and I have user registration disabled, this actually only concerned me. But still it was annoying (there’s some top-secret password-protected pages on this site where I use comments to keep track of certain things concerning this site, like bugs to squash ). That was probably due to some stupid mistake that I made earlier when prepping this site for initial launch. It took me a while to trace it back to it’s origin, but now I’m finally able to comment on myself while logged in.
Then, I tweaked the home page to always be /home/ instead of / for more clarity. Whenever someone tries to access / on this site, he or she is silently redirected to /home/ to reflect that in their browser.

And finally, to the outside world probably the most visible change, the home page now lists the three most recent posts from my blog.

Today, I launched my new site, which is (again) powered by WordPress. I used this theme as a basis, and tweaked it to my needs.

Reason for using WordPress is that I pretty much lost interest in building my own CMS, at least for the time being. My interests have moved to other things.

Reason for using an existing theme to base the layout on is mainly MSIE. I got sick and tired of designing layouts that would end up working half or not at all in that browser. And until MSIE 7 (wich has at least some standards compliance) gets mainstream and MSIE 6 is no longer popular, I don’t think I’ll change my mind about that.

Happy browsing.