KJToo

It’s the third annual CSS Naked Day, so I’ve disabled all stylesheets for the blog. This is what the site would look like every day if not for the magic of Cascading Style Sheets: functional, but not very pretty.

CSS Naked Day is the brainchild of User Interface Engineer Dustin Diaz. It is intended to “to promote Web Standards with layered semantic markup, and a clear separation between content, and presentation to enhance accessibility.”

This year, more than a thousand websites have signed up for the event, signifying their intent to strip away the pretty CSS and show the world what’s underneath.

EDIT: Bloginatrix Lorelle van Fossen has an excellent explanation of why we’re observing CSS Naked Day on her meta-blog, Lorelle on WordPress.

Posted April 8, 2008 Comments(2)

I spent a good deal of time this weekend fiddling around with the Sandbox theme from plaintxt.org. Plaintxt.org is the brainchild of Scott Wallick, and he describes it as “[m]inimalism in blogging: an experiment out of control”. In the two and a half years since I installed WordPress, I’ve used at least three of Scott’s plaintxt.org themes: Barthelme, plaintxtBlog and now Sandbox.

Where Barthelme and plaintxtBlog are both fully developed from a visual standpoint, Sandbox is more like a blank slate upon which a design can be built; think of it as an unfrosted cake ready for anything your imagination (and your skill with a tube of colored frosting) can throw at it.

If you’re familiar with the old look of the site, it might appear that all I’ve done is shift the left sidebar over to the right, and there’s good reason for that: my goal was to, in essence, recreate the basic look of Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel theme, but with two right-hand sidebars instead of one on either side of the main column. Ultimately, the changes to the design will be significant enough to fully distinguish it from Brian’s1, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could mimic at least part of his crisp, clean look using Sandbox as a base.

I’m pretty pleased with the outcome so far. There are areas that still need work (the far right sidebar has a tendency to drop out of place when viewing a single post with Internet Explorer, for example), but the basic look is coming together nicely. I’ve had one person tell me they’re not a fan of the dual sidebars on the right-hand side, but I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

As always, I encourage anyone with an opinion on the design to share it with me in the comments. I know that the archives and library pages are a mess right now, and I’ll post an update when I’ve fixed them, but if you see anything else that seems out of place, needs improvement, or is just plain ugly, let me know.

1. I’ll start by designing my own post-separator graphic. [back]

Posted October 1, 2007 Comments(0)

Things may not look pretty if you’re reading this on 05 April, but don’t worry, everything will be back to “normal” tomorrow. CSS Naked Day has rolled around again, and this is the second year I’m participating. Today and today only, I’m not concerned about margins and padding, positioning and color. What you’re seeing is the site as it is generated without Cascading Style Sheets.

Tomorrow, the pretty will return. For now, you get to see KJToo.com with its clothes off.

Posted April 5, 2007 Comments(8)

I’ve tentatively chosen Blue Zinfandel 2.0 by Brian Gardner as the base theme for the blog. I had about a half-dozen themes selected as possibilities; Blue Zinfandel is the one Laura liked best. One thing Laura doesn’t like is the typesetting in the header and the general lack of color throughout. I can see what she means, but I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet.

A couple of days ago, I read an article over at The Thinking Blog about David Airey, a creative designer and blogger who updated his site design based on feedback from his readers. I’d like to do something similar here. Unfortunately, I’m not a graphic designer and my HTML/PHP/CSS skills are intermediate, at best. Nonetheless, if you’d like to provide feedback and suggestions, I’ll see what I can do to make things better.

Posted March 18, 2007 Comments(6)

Today is the first annual CSS Naked Day, and if you’re viewing the site on 05 April, it’s going to look very… plain. The CSS, or Cascading Style Sheet, is what makes the site pretty and keeps everything where it’s supposed to be. Everything from colors to font styles and sizes to how lists are handled is accomplished through CSS, and today I’ve disabled CSS on the site. Well, on the blog. I didn’t mess with the forum or the photo gallery because, quite frankly, doing so would involve some serious effort on my part. I’m nowhere near as familiar with the inner workings of SMF (the forum software) or Coppermine (the photo gallery software) as I am with WordPress (the blog software).

Maybe someday I’ll replace everything with a true CMS and I’ll be able to turn off CSS for everything with ease. Until someone designs a CMS that does everything I want it to and does it elegantly, though, I’m sticking with separate applications to handle the separate functions.

Anyway, enjoy (or despise) CSS Naked Day. Tomorrow, everything will be back to what passes for normal around here.

Posted April 5, 2006 Comments(5)