Those of you not reading this through a feed (that is, if anyone actually subscribes to my feed…) will notice things looking a little … different.
This is the long-awaited, long promised redesign! The previous design has been in use since before my site moved to A Small Orange in October 2005. It was time for a change, time for a fresh look, time to update the site to better reflect me. That was a challenge on its own.
As I began toying with designs, I had to confront the question What reflects my personality? What could I put in my personal site design? After all, that’s the only purpose this site has—it’s a vanity site. I could incorporate pictures of me, except I don’t have many. Maybe some scenes of Thunder Bay. I toyed with various concepts and positioning. Eventually I struck on the idea of using a vertical banner image of my socks-and-sandals photo. It looked nifty and different, plus it is most definitely me. I like socks with sandals. 
I chipped away at the rest of the design piece by piece. I found a good stock photo of a tea cup to include in the background. I added some content to my about section. And it all came together. It’s been a lot of work, but I’m fairly pleased with the final result.
I‘ve aggregated more content by including widgets that show what I’m reading, what I‘m doing, future plans, and even sites I think are cool. These will automatically update as I update my information on those various websites, which means less maintenance for me.
The photo gallery has also been redone to use a framework that accesses my Flickr photos. Unfortunately, I’ve run into some configuration problems with it—I‘m very much aware of the unfortunate error message you’ll receive if you try to view it right now. I hope to have that fixed soon. Also, I will eventually get around to styling the scripts wiki to match the rest of the site layout. I decided not to wait to launch the design.
Now that I‘ve given my website an overhaul, I will try to overhaul the documentation for VSNS Lemon and then release VSNS Lemon 4.0 (which is what this blog now uses). After that, I have a new coding project I’m really excited about. It’s kind of massive, however, so I’m not sure how well it will go … we shall see. 
» 9 people have an opinion
Yeah, I couldn’t find an appropriate spot for them in the new design. They may return, however! I have included a new random quotation-like feature: some “one-liners” below my foot in the left sidebar.
Looks really nice. 
I wish I had any sort of design sense. I‘d like to actually build a website that’s not just a blog for myself and Ruzena, but time constraints and inability to design something on my own make that kind of difficult.
Good job, though.
Excellent redesign. It’s different but very good. You and Jory are both itching me to change mine.
Woa Ben! You did a verry nice job on this design. Clean yet beautifull.
Except for your Google agenda, that needs some styling. (Though I’m not sure thats even possible.)
Oh, and is it me, or is the Javascript behind the formatting buttons for links and images a bit slow? It looks great, but it takes a while to load.
But all in all, great job!
The calendar is a simple iframe. Not ideal, but it gets the job done remarkably well. I took a look at the Calendar API, and while it is definitely robust, I‘m too lazy to write accessible calendar markup right now. So that will have to wait.
You’re right about the link and image prompts. I’m not sure why; it isn’t that slow on the demo page. I think I’ll just switch back to regular prompts.
totally dig the new design (your math probs are still hard to figure out ) 
I like the design a lot, the flavor reminds me of alistapart, and I appreciate the subtle jquery stuff a lot more now that I use it myself
Now get working on vsns so I can mess around with it.
I like it. The new design is nice and clean.
I am also very amused by the Google search link for your math problems.
Leave your opinion
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Formatting
- Bold
**Bold text**- Italics
//Italic text//- Underline
__Underlined text__- Monospace
''Monospaced text''- Link
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[[http://google.com/|Google search engine]]Bare URLs will automatically become links.
- Images
{{http://imageurl.com/image.png|Alternate text if the image does not load}}- Quotation
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> This is a quotation.
> It can span multiple lines.
>
> Or even paragraphs, as long as each line has a > before it. - Unordered list
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* List item (note two spaces preceding the asterisk)
* Second list item - Ordered list
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- List item (note two spaces preceding the dash)
- Second list item - Definition list
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t: Term (note two spaces preceding the t)
d: Definition (note two spaces preceding the d)
Nice work Ben I like the new style. The one thing I think that is missing are the quotes that used to be at the top of the page. Other than that awesome job!
Monday, June 9, 2008 at 11:43 PM