Posted by Richard White
Thu, 13 Apr 2006 02:39:23 GMT
This it folks, the fabled trifecta: three releases in one day. Starting with AjaxScaffold 3.0.0 release, then the addition of RSS and iCAL feed consumption to Kiko and finally a refresh of Brighthouse. I’m pooped so lets get on with the, mostly minor, changes:
- Overrode the live/search.rhtml in the theme directory. You no longer have to overwrite files in the Typo codebase for Brighthouse to work.
- Changed the right sidebar to be absolutely positioned so that text overflows in the content area (like from long text in <pre> tags) wouldn’t wrap the sidebar to the bottom in IE.
- Made the footer only span the content pane since the layout is no longer floated
- Styled the older pages links at the bottom and some other sundries that I’ve since forgotten
- Styled static pages to have the same headers as blog posts
Not really exciting stuff, especially compared to what else has gone on today, but there it is. As always you can download the latest from the Brighthouse page. Goodnight!
Posted by Richard White
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:46:00 GMT
I spent the better half of yesterday migrating this blog to Typo and bringing the associated articles on the old one over. I was originally just using a Blogger account that was being SFTP’d to my web server. That was a decent solution for a blog when you want a quick and dirty way to get started. But it was time to move to something with a little more flexibility and credibility(?). It also forced me to learn how to configure lighttpd to handle multiple Rails applications on the same domain (what other apps are on this domain you say? you’ll see, you’ll see).
In the process of converting to Typo I needed to migrate my look and feel. In Typo it was easy enough to do this by creating a new theme, which is exactly what I did and I named her Brighthouse. You can download the theme from the resources link on your right. I’ll go ahead and include my short configuration instructions here so they’ll be easier to find (you can also find them in about.markdown which is what shows up when you import the theme into Typo.
Unfortunately I cannot find any good sites that keep a list of Type themes. I found this page on the Typo trac, but it looks like it hasn’t been updated lately. There is also TypoGarden that recently put on a theme contest. There are some themes on there but you have to search back through their post archives and there appears to be no concise list or way to upload new themes. Let me know if you know of any Typo theme sites.
Getting Started with Brighthouse
- Download the zip file and extract it into your themes directory in Typo
- Add your personal information to the about box in /themes/brighthouse/layouts/default.rhtml
- Add your headshot photo into /themes/brighthouse/images/headshot.gif_(of course you can change that url in the default.rhtml)
Optionally you can create static sidebar lists with specialized list icons using <ul class="resources"> and <ul class="feeds">
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 16 Feb 2006 02:06:00 GMT
Anyone looking for a really poor example of how to design a sports portal should look now further than NBC’s dubious NBCOlympics.com.
Forget for a minute the fact that I can’t even watch any of the videos on that site because of their use of Windows Media with DRM (Not just a principle thing the bloody update really won’t work); This site is absolute madness. When it loads up I have no idea where I should be looking, there are about 4 columns that all look the same (save for the left nav), with tons of smaller subsections thrown everywhere.
It doesn’t help that they use the same colors and fonts for just about everything, absolutely no differentiation. It is also the poster child for everything that is wrong with portals like this: absolutely no care for what I, the user, would want to do. They can’t be bothered with that when they are throwing 15 sections of madness and a headline slideshow my way. Clearly the intent is to drive where I go instead of letting me use the site to find what I want.
Granted, pushing user’s in a certain direction is fine as long as you also give them the necessary tools to find their own way.
But what really pissed me off is that it took me 20 minutes to find something as simple as the standings for Men’s Ice Hockey. Try it, go to Ice Hockey. Now what? Well it appears from the left nav link that we are already at Men’s Ice Hockey.
Okay then… well where are the links to the rest of this stuff? Hmmm there are some headlines, nope thats not what I want. Top stories, nope. Upcoming events, nope. These videos on the far side (that I can’t even view), nope.
Let’s scroll down maybe its down further.. Oh good a couple more ads for games, intel viiv, a fan club… sheesh.
I’ll give you a few minutes to try it, come back when you are ready for the shocking conclusion.
You ready? Remember back when we first went to the Ice Hockey page, and it showed that we were already looking at Men’s Ice Hockey via the red link on the side? Well that was a blatant UI lie. Click on the Men’s link under ICE HOCKEY. TADA!
Ugh.
