¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Thu, July 22

Design Notes

As promised, I want to discuss some aspects of the design and structure here.  Below is the unformatted list I used to track the features I wanted to address in the first release of this site:

x  new design
x  MT 3.0
-  choice of designs
-  choice of font sizes
-  better searching
x  rss for linkblog
-  comments for linkblog
x  better archives for linkblog
x  new archive structure
x  kill comment popups for normal blog
x  add trackbacks

X’s are for completed items, -’s aren’t.

The other items in my list are pretty self-explanatory.  Other blogs can send trackbacks to my posts, which you can see on individual entry pages on the side.  These trackbacks are links to entries on other sites with related subject matter to the post on my site.  Further reading and whatnot.  The other items were largely user requested.  Every link I post on the side is now archived forever.  There are rss feeds for the links.  There will be comments for the links shortly (I wanted to get this out in the wild sooner rather than wait for feature creep to rear its ugly face).  Additionally, there will be site searching, but that takes quite a while to develop and again, getting this site online was far more important.  And anyway why would you need a search for two posts?  User-selectable styles?  Did I say that?  We shall see…

You’ll notice there is no firm navigation anywhere to be found on the site.  Yes, the masthead of every page points back to home base, but that’s about it.  I did this because I want this site to break free from the cut and paste format of so many blogs.  I tried to ensure that every page allows access to related pages but only to related pages.  Heavy bloat is a sin equal to skimpy offerings.  I feel that my decision here adds a personalized and logical structure to every page, hopefully making page to page browsing easier and more streamlined for you.

This site was tackled with standards and accessibility firmly in mind from the outset.  At the bottom of every page you can find urls to check the validity of the structure, style and accessibility of whatever it is you’re viewing.  There are a few small errors here and there, but as Mike Davidson so firmly put it, completely strict validation is neither necessary nor entirely worthwhile.  I wrote these pages in xhtml 1.0 strict, but - and hold on here, this is shocking - I use the target attribute in the links in the comments.  This isn’t valid and that’s a-ok with me.  That’s the only error that really comes to mind as a frequently invalid item, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others slinking in the shadows.

As mentioned in the colophon, I owe an absolutely enormous thank you to the wisdom of Jeffrey Zeldman.  Not to suggest he directly helped out with the work here at all, his is the most brilliant of guiding lights in web design.  Dishing out intelligent, practical and applicable advice and techniques, he has helped out more than I can say.  Between his Designing With Web Standards and his online mag A List Apart the debt I owe can be repaid only with results.  I think this site goes a long way in that department.

Web standards, man.  They produce results.

2 people have chimed in.
→ Add your 2¢ by reading through and commenting at the end.

1 → Shane Cavanaugh  –  (Jul 22 2004, 11:32 PM)

Is this the blogger formerly known as stereoboy?!

2 → Shane Cavanaugh  –  (Jul 22 2004, 11:36 PM)

Oh, f. I didn’t read the previous post. Where the hell have you been?! You were one of my regulars back in the day. The day being a couple months ago. Glad to see you’re back. Excellent new site by the way. I likes me some good design.






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