Saturday, December 30, 2006

Making progress...feedback needed!

I think I have my "New Blogger" template almost completed.

I was up until almost 3am this morning working on it.

Then I got up again at 9am and continued on.

At around 9:30am I gave up and briefly reverted back to my original template as I couldn't get the three-columns to behave nicely (either in Firefox or IE7).

So I started from scratch and just started playing with the CSS margin settings, body sizes, and alignments.

Somehow I stumbled upon the trick!

Next was getting the embedded images in the thinner side-columns to not whack those column elements out. That took more work, but now I think I have it down.

I have a bit of fine-tuning still to do, but am amazed that it actually looks better (to me) in IE7 than in Firefox! That was a surprise.

Windows Live Writer is posting fine to it again.

I also will probably get around soon to changing/activating the links to the right in the header body. Just haven't made any final decisions yet.

I can't decide if I should set the text alignment in the main post body to "justify" or "align-left."

Also, I've got to figure out how to get the images (like in the Fan Service Bonus section) to hot-link again. The XHTML code for the images is a bit different in those widgets that HTML. I upload a cropped/downsized image to Blogger, then code it with a direct HTML href link to the page. That way I don't steal bandwidth, but visitors can still click directly to the artist's source page. But that's not working right now the way I have the image reference coded. (sighs). I have to manually set the image size values of them so they don't blow out the side-columns again...and all my hard work!

Hope you enjoy the new look. I am really excited now and think it looks much more polished and easily read.

Please leave me your feedback! I'm really interested in knowing what you think!

--Claus

P.S. I promise to post those "how-to" links I've found. Right now, Alvis is begging for a round of PS2: Lego Star Wars II. It's a really fun game! Even Lavie is itching to get into the action!

3 comments:

Michael said...

Claus - I'm viewing your site in Firefox 2.0.0.1 and it looks fine! I did notice on the right sidebar there are "?" before each of the months; probably just a little tweaking needed.

Harmon
aggie75

Claus said...

Thanks Harmon!

These "widgets" are really a pain in the rear to get used to.

I think I fixed the "?"'s that were showing up in the archive list. I had to delete that widget (it was converted automatically from the old template). Then I re-added it fresh. Then I switched from the current view to a "flat" view. Saved. Then switched back. Now little arrow symbols are showing. Looks good from FF 2.0 and IE7 now. (I haven't loaded Opera so I can't tell...nor Safari.)

Whew!

BTW--I have a whole separate post planned (hopefully this weekend) devoted to a shopping tip you gave me a while back. It turned out to be the biggest hit of the holidays!

Michael said...

Claus - your site looks great in Opera 9.02; can't help you with Safari as I am a Redmond man except for my iPod... :)

I will guess the shopping tip has something to do with Green Tea... Hope you got some in your Christmas stocking!

Michael Harmon
aggie75