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April 10, 2004
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Hey - thanks for the comments on my design. Let me tell you what's up and why I'm doing it.
I told you that I put this Weblog up as an experiment in Movable Type. That's true. But, I had already put up other homepages and blogs, using templates. I've never taken the time to develop any technical expertise, despite having spent five years at MIT and being in San Francisco during the Tech Boom and hanging out with friends and their startups.
When I put up this Weblog, I took on the standard Movable Type 'Clean' template. Initially I wanted to know how to tweak it because it didn't look the same on some browsers. (The MT "Clean" is still the stylesheet I'm using.)
But to step back, I was super impressed that were put up by some of the bloggers that I�ve gotten to know through blogging. Joel Blain, Jason Smith, Pray Naked and Benjamin Wagner to name a few.
(Joel Blain expresses an incredible love for the visual and a keen aesthetic sense in his blog.)
And, since Doug Bowman is one of the best friends, I've been exposed to a top tier CSS designer through his work. (Doug offices with Jeffrey Veen over at Adaptive Path.) Seeing what those guys produce can be overwhelming as well as awesomely inspiring! (I put Rowell Sotto in that same category.)
My friend, Owen, got into this about the same time as I did; as did our friend, Darrin. (Darrin and I are at similar spots in our blog design learning curve.) Robby, my MIT buddy/friend who really is a rocket scientist has an MT Weblog to chronicle the program Bookcase he wrote, and some rocket scientist stuff going on around him at Jet Propulsion Labs.
So it's been fun to have friends to share this stuff with.
Specifically, this is what I�ve tried to do:
- It was easy to tweak the color scheme - but it was tough finding colors that wouldn't wash out on different browsers and platforms.
- I found Elise online last week. Her blog has awesome tips for a newbie like me. She taught me how to add extra pages.
- Benjamin Wagner hand codes his Weblog, using CSS and html. I got the idea of what I call the navigation table from his blog. (It's a very basic html table.)
- I love photos, so I just threw those up on each page using html tags. (I'm glad that they appear to work and didn't totally foul up the css templates.)
- The About and Photos pages I put up are 100% html hand coding. Again, I only know a few basics, and these pages have given me the most heck getting them to work across browsers and platforms.
I know that an experienced designer could look at my stylesheets and index pages and scream about the lack of elegance of what I've put up. However, I'm having a great time. And I think that I'm learning stuff everyday.
I hope that other newbies will share what they're learning.
Posted by roland at April 10, 2004 07:00 PMPosted to Weblogs
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Comments
It all looks great!
Posted by: Randy at April 10, 2004 09:46 PM