Monday October 18, 2004
Site redesign notes
When I got my new Application Server job I decided that I was going to use this blog to post some of my presentations, papers, and notes regarding J2EE and Sun's application server. This decision led me to invest in a little site redesign. Both to improve the UI and to make it stand out from the rest of the blogs.sun.com crowd. (Previously I had been using a slightly modified version of one of the standard Roller templates.)
If I have to say so myself, I'm pretty pleased with the results. There's still some tweaking I need to do here and there, but the design is really pleasing to my eye at least. The new page validates, which is nice, and it's actually a CSS box layout which I usually shy away from. It probably looks like crap in Netscape 4.x, but I think that people still using Netscape 4.x are used to that already. I'm a little nervous about it looking OK in IE, but I don't have any Windows machines I can test with.
Some site credits:
- I'm not a web design wizard. I relied heavily on Owen Brigg's collection of CSS resources. They haven't been updated in a while, but I still reference them regularly. I'm especially dependent on Owen's layout box resource, including his IE5 workarounds. This page design borrows a lot of CSS code from his IE5 workaround examples.
- Another web design tool I use frequently is Brian Wilson's online CSS and HTML references. As far as I know, this is neither the famous musician Brian Wilson, nor the Sun chief technologist Brian Wilson.
- The photo is a photo of me standing in a field at Valley Forge park. The photo was taken by my girlfriend on October 3rd. This historic location is less than a mile away from Sun's Philadelphia office (which is my nearest Sun location).
- I should also tip my hat to David M Johnson, for creating Roller. I found the Roller customization easy to do and in the process I found lots of new functionality that I didn't know that Roller could do.
Remaining todos:
- Refresh and add to the web site links on the navbar.
- Add back the category links and possibly some more category related functionality.
- Detach the CSS into its own file (I'm statically importing it using a Roller macro now.)
- Consider some comment alternatives based on some of my new Roller knowledge
- Improve some of the site navigation, especially links back to the blogs.sun.com home and back to the root of my blog.
- Bring up a test version of this site on the Sun internal site so that I can test some of the Roller 0.9.9 features, especially some of the MarsEdit integration.
(2004-10-18 12:23:57.0)
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