Joen, my Danish friend who runs a journal and graph­ical instal­ment out­let, has just launched the new design of his site. (You heard it here first kids!) And what a design it is! As I said on Joen’s site itself:

May I be the first to con­grat­u­late you on Pangea! It really does take good care of your sites whole eco­sys­tem, while being so clear and effect­ive it pos­it­ively hurts! It’s nice to have a use­ful homepage, the instal­ment box in par­tic­u­lar is a great fea­ture. For the rest, great align­ing, fant­astic white space — not that we expect any­thing less of course :)

The atten­tion to detail is pretty darn good too. Even the X to close the comment-formatting-box has a high­light state! And to my sur­prise the wee bite you’ve taken out of the top-right of the boxes break up the boxxy­ness enough — even though they’re really small bites.

Solid design, and I can’t wait what col­ours you’ll inject with one of your (semi)-monthly redesigns.

~ source: Noscope Pangea

I’ve finally got­ten round to tweak­ing this site into shape. I’d already ditched the ver­tical bars, but the align­ment still wasn’t right and the code was get­ting mud­dier and mur­kier. Seeing as how the spring 2006 CSS Reboot was just around the corner, I had a dead­line: 1st of May 2006.

Notable changes are the gen­eral shifts in align­ment (not just for improved flow, but also to give me more room for in-line images), the back­ground and nav­ig­a­tion bar col­our shift (both are now slightly lighter) and boxes around the com­ments (just like noscope — I plead guilty!). I’ll have to redesign the com­ments once I enable gravatars too (instead of just favicons), but this will have to do for now.

New addi­tions are Cameron Moll’s icon to my inspir­a­tions list (not that he’s a recent find, but up till now I didn’t have a good icon to work from), “latest com­ments” in the side­bar and a (slightly dif­fer­ent one from on the main page) side­bar for the single-post pages (just click a title to get to them).

Funnily enough, the thing I’m most proud of is mov­ing the previous/next page nav­ig­a­tion on single-post pages to the side­bar. It’s a very little change, but I really feel they work a lot bet­ter there.

What do you think? (Oh and don’t for­get to vote for me on the CSS Reboot site!)

Bite Size Standards, a pro­ject that has taken up quite a lot of my time has launched today. It was ini­ti­ated by John Oxton of Joshuaink fame, but as CSS guy all parties had to deal with me, so I ended up doing and influ­en­cing a lot. It’s been really fun to work with the whole team and it’s been par­tic­u­larly great to finally shush out some semantic and access­ib­il­ity quer­ies. So for now, I’ll just leave you with a descrip­tion of what Bite Size Standards is.

Bite Size Standards aims to offer con­cise web devel­op­ment tutori­als, tips and tricks. Written by design­ers and developers who are pas­sion­ate about web standards.

A full slightly longer write-up of what we actu­ally went through and why we did cer­tain things will come a lot later and can be found on my port­fo­lio.

If, like me, you waited to update your WordPress install­a­tion until 2.0.1 came out, you might have noticed that your art­icle feed turned into a com­ment feed. Which, as we can see from the fol­low­ing pic­ture, is rather det­ri­mental to your vis­itor figures:

It’s worth not­ing this doesn’t hap­pen to every­one — just to people who have index.php in front of their permalinks. The fix for this prob­lem is included in 2.0.2, but it’s a bit silly to have to wait until it comes out. Luckily there’s an easy two-step solu­tion to the problem:

1) As per the instruc­tions at Trac Bug Ticket 2379 :

Open the file ‘classes.php’ in your wp-includes/ folder. Find line num­ber 1321; it should look like this:

// Root
(blah blah)

// Comments
$comments_rewrite = $this->generate_rewrite_rules($this->root . $this->comments_base, true, true, true);
$comments_rewrite = apply_filters(‘comments_rewrite_rules’, $comments_rewrite);

That first line in the com­ments sec­tion (in bold) needs another ‘, false’ behind it. That means it should end up like so:

// Comments
$comments_rewrite = $this->generate_rewrite_rules($this->root . $this->comments_base, true, true, true, false);

2) Now go to your ‘Options’ panel in your WordPress admin centre. Click on the ‘permalinks’ tab. If you’ve chosen the 4th option, copy your cus­tom struc­ture to clip­board (ctrl+c). Select the 1st option. Click ‘update permalink struc­ture’. Now select your ori­ginal option again. If it the 4th, put your cus­tom struc­ture back in again. Click ‘update permalink struc­ture’ again. Or, because an image speaks a thou­sand words:

That’s all there is to it!

Update: WP 2.0.2 is out, and the fix is indeed included. Remember to use the spe­cial upgrade pro­ced­ure — it’s a quick delete/move & upload this time!

Recent pick­ings on the web have been rather fruit­ful lately, so I decided it’d be a good time to share them:

~ The proper way to use the Photoshop Colour Replacement Tool over on Veerle’s journal is a rather good read.

~ iTunes Library Updater: The best — and only? — way to prop­erly clean your iTunes lib­rary on Windows. Worked won­ders for mine.

~ Veerle’s journal itself. Recently redesigned, it’s received a lot of com­ple­ments and atten­tion from across the web. Seeing as how the design is well thought out on so many levels, that’s not surprising.

~ If Microsoft was in charge of the iPod pack­aging, what would it look like? A rather nice video visu­al­ising the dif­fer­ent mar­ket (and thus mar­ket­ing) Microsoft and Apple have.

~ High qual­ity (print qual­ity even!) PhotoShop brushes ran­ging from a ‘Fresh Foliage’ col­lec­tion to ‘Worn’ ones (linked at the bot­tom) by Jason Gaylor. It’d be an under­state­ment to say they’re good.

~ WTF 2.0 About how it’s not about cool stuff, but how to make money from cool stuff. And how mobile (unsur­pris­ingly) got thrown out of the web 2.0 mix, but is mak­ing bucket loads of dosh.

That’s all folks!

Sooo…guess who’s occupy­ing the top-spot, the prime loc­a­tion, the num­bero uno place at Yahoo! for the search ‘Webdesign Portfolio’ ?

But what does one write on such an occa­sion? Is “I’d like to thank my fam­ily, my friends, the guys at gameover.com, my cli­ents, Programmers Notepad, all the nice people at Adobe — oh and Johnny, couldn’t have done it without you! *cue tears* ” really over the top? A tad too much eh?

Well, how about “Thank you for this token of your recog­ni­tion of my hard work and pure SEO, but I refuse to believe that my Journal is a bet­ter web­design port­fo­lio than my Portfolio. It’s not right I tell you, It’s not right!”. Is that bet­ter? Make me seem like an ungrate­ful so-and-so? Hmm, you’re prob­ably right..

So what does one say on such a joy­ous occa­sion?

7 sig­nals from the watch­ful elves of impend­ing doom. 9 rules for the dwar­ven lords, who broke them which res­ul­ted in 21 degree burn marks. 24 ways were tried to heal them, but in the end they just hid the marks with the help of 28 make-up stu­dios and one digital effects stu­dio. But alas, the marks worsened to 36 degree burn marks. No wait, 37!

Then, sud­denly, the same num­ber of sig­nals were received. ‘Go to 5411 CO’, they said. What a weird post­code! Where could that be?

So they trav­elled all 360 degrees of the world — shud­der — before they thank­fully ended up at 456 Bereastreet. There, in room 313 they finally found what they were look­ing for…

So what’s the deal with num­bers and design stu­dio names?