Lucentbeing.com

As is probably evident by now, I recently updated the style of my blog. It comes hot on the heels of my Kratos 2009 ordeal (more on that later), which showed me a whole new urgency to web develeopment and design.

Although the visible changes are fairly minor — The colors have changed, and the page has gotten thinner as a whole — most of the changes are in the source code. The html is now much cleaner — I got rid of all the extra id s and class es that I didn’t use — and applied some common sense to the design.

I also used a reset stylesheet for the first time (specifically this one), which forced me to explicitly define all my styles. It worked out much better.

I actually did some research into color schemes, typography, etc. while doing the templates up. It’s really interesting to read about measure, rhythm, widows, etc.

Although I’ve incorporated a lot of those ideas into the design of this website, there are some things I just had to go roughshod over. For example, I can’t conceive making the main content column of this blog a mere 400px wide, although that’s what several treatises on typography recommend.

My site also validates HTML5 now…almost. My own HTML is fine, but docutils is slightly off. If I can write an html5css3 writer for it, that will be that. That said, I’m not making use of any crazy features that HTML5 offers, I’ll at least wait until the spec reaches standardization for that.

I’ve also added subtitles to post, which although minor, made me do some database gymnastics to get right. Amen to ./manage.py dumpdata/loaddata.