Posts Tagged ‘design’

New, extremely minimalist redesign

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I’ve been working for a while on a single consistent theme and templating system for the entire website. A few months ago I finished everything but the blog (which was using the ClockWorkAir theme), because, being powered by WordPress, I wasn’t familiar with the theme system.

Anyways, I’ve finally implemented the new, extremely minimalist design everywhere. The plugin Theme Switch helped a bunch, because it allowed me to preview what I was working on without the general public seeing it. WordPress itself was a pain though, because I’m used to coding by hand and not using any kind of framework to generate HTML. I ended up doing some pretty silly things. For example, I first started by trying to get WordPress to simply call my custom templating files for the rest of the site. Following the logic of my system I did things like:

$title = wp_title();
//...
require('head.php'); //My custom templating system

Whenever I loaded the page there was a mysterious “Nomulous Blog” at the very top of my HTML source. This confused me at first, but I soon realized that (not having been designed to be processed, only displayed) the wp_title() function printed a value instead of returning one.

In the end I just went to my home page, copied most of the source, and modified the default WordPress theme to use that instead. Aha!

The public beta of Wikipedia’s new interface announced

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Ahh, that’s why. The reason Wikipedia has been acting like 4chan on a bad day is that they were upgrading their software, and now we know exactly what part was upgraded.

Pretty!

Pretty!

They added a little link at the top of the page entitled “Try Beta”. If you click on it, and log in, you’ll be able to switch your current interface for a brand spanking new look n’ feel. It looks nice, but I’m not sure whether I’m happy about sacrificing the speed and simplicity of the current design just for a few whistles and shiny menu bars.

Edit: Apparently the wonkiness was actually related to something else. The new look is still pretty cool though.