Saturday, July 01, 2006

Layout Tweaking

I'm pretty lethargic today and I blame it on the weather.

I got my head shaved again (skin-tight flat-top) first thing in the morning. That meant I had to shave my face so it matches. I always hate shaving. If I could just keep the stubble to the "day-after-shaving" length I would be happy as a clam.

Watched Brittan go down to Portugal in the World Cup (at least Germany won). Poor Becks. Out with an injury mid-way into the match. Bummer.

The Shuttle launch got scrubbed. I was looking forward to watching that with Alvis--but better safe than sorry.

I have been making some small tweaks to the Grand Stream Dreams blog template today. There have been some real minor peeves on it. I finally got the comments to be set at a more readable font-size as well as getting them aligned "left". That center alignment was really wigging me out!

I also adjusted the main blog body text padding to have a little less whitespace. I think it displays better now.

I've added some standard spacing elements between the blog title, date, and text body. I had been having to try to remember to add those spaces in during composing each post--sometimes I forgot and it would look too scrunched. I also removed the redundant posting date at the bottom of the post.

I am really learning to respect the work professional web-layout designers do. It's hard enough for me to deal with these little tweaks and make them look half-way decent. Much less a full website. My blog is mostly designed to look good on my monitor. With my Sage sidebar excluded, I try to make it look nice at a screen spread of 1024 pixels. That's what my laptop runs at work and with the Sage sidebar open in Firefox the previous body padding values made it the posts look pencil-thin and goofy. I think this works better.

IE6 still gives the CSS/HTML code on this page some problems, but it looks perfect (to me) in Firefox. IE7 seems to handle it fine as well. Go figure.

I still want to add one more sidebar element. I think (somewhere) I will post an element of my favorite posts from here. I'm still having to go back and do Google searches to find certain posts that have links I refer to for software downloads and the like. But that can wait for later.

Yesterday I found Layout-palooza : Top CSS Layout Download Sites, Hacks, Galleries and Tricks

I'm not ready to change this blog layout yet, but there are tons of sites and resources at that link for blog designers.

Some of my Site Design favorites:

The Layout Reservoir at BlueRobot The simple look works well.
mezzoblue's css Zen Garden I am such a beginner compared to the artful work of these design masters. Hundreds of designs. Fresh and fanciful.
Mollio CSS/HTML Templates Black, White and Red never looked so good. What Audrey Hepburn might look like if she was a blog.
maxdesign's Sample CSS Page Layouts I just love the image header on this page. Classic.
Living Web Design Showcase - Darkeye and Unmatched Style | CSS Gallery and Website Design Inspiration, Some cutting-edge design work getting showed off here.
Want to view the design work of over 3500 websites? Try CSS Mania's Galleries

I am SUCH an amateur....
--Claus

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