Brandonsanderson.com upgrade

[Spriggan]

Here's the mock up of the new layout for the blog (doesn't include the menu change).

www.brandonsanderson.com/graphics/Blog_resdesign1.png

So what do you think? ﾃつ I want to make better use of the space where the amazon links are so I might have to create my own custom amazon links that are much smaller. Besides that 's a fairly straight forward design and nothing too special about it since it more or less is the same content/layout that many blogs have now days.

I'm not liking the green too much now that I've spent some time looking at the design, it draws the eyes too much to the calender and search box and makes it hard to focus on the blog text itself.

[stacer]

On categories, if you don't like "Community," consider "Forum."

For the EUOLogies and stuff like that that hasn't been used for a while, you might consider an "Archives" link rather than "Other"--that way people know it's old stuff.

[stacer]

The new blog layout looks nice, too.

[CtrlZed]

Yeah, kudos for the new blog design . . . much more functional and navigationally friendly.

[Spriggan]

Wow, I'm using an Apple monitor at work and the thing doesn't display any of the maroon or green in that new blog layout.

[Spriggan]

Humm...For the amazon links I'm thinking of using a beta link type that amazon has, basically when you leave your mouse over an image or link a popup window appears with all the product info.  That way we could just have the small book image and a title and it will look better.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Wow, I'm using an Apple monitor at work and the thing doesn't display any of the maroon or green in that new blog layout.

What's it supposed to look like?

[Spriggan]

Nothing fancy but the calender and searchbox are maroon with a green border.

By upping the contrast and brightness to the max I was able to see them at about half the intensity that I had designed.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Oh.

Hm, the calendar is black on my home mac as well.

I ran it through w3's validator... The html has several <br\> and <br \ > and <br\ > tags that should be <br /> in it. There are also some img tags terminated with \ instead of / . There are also some frameborder="no" that should be frameborder="0" (I guess, since that's what's used in other places on the same page) and the validator doesn't understand "allowtransparency" or "background-color" on the iframe. It also says there's a </center> tag with no <center> before it, and some <br>s that are unclosed.

[Spriggan]

thank you ookla  .  Sorry but I don't need validation lectures, especially considering this is like the 4th time you've brought this up.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

You're...welcome?

No lecture, I just reported what I found. Just looking to see if there's some reason why it's not displaying as you intended. *shrug*

[Spriggan]

Sorry, thought you were complaining again that I didn't have alt tags on my images like you have before.

No, none of those errors actually affect the rendering, browsers automatically fix things like that. ﾃつ Also the new design I showed was an image not an html page so the problem is, as is the case with Apple monitors, is that they don't have a very good brightness or color resolution especially their older monitors. ﾃつ Heck even their top of the line cinima displays haven't even matched Dell's flat screen yet in terms of specs.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/08/apples-20-23-inch-cinema-displays-get-bumps-price-cuts/

[EUOL]

Sprig,

That's very odd, since TigerMoux always claims that one of the big focuses of the Mac screens is their ability to display colors more realistically in pictures and the like than PC's can.  (Or used to, back when everybody used Macs for photo editing.)  

[Spriggan]

They use to in the 90s and early 2000 but now that LCDs are cheap they've really been hit hard. ﾃつ Dell and Toshiba really have some good stuff out there. ﾃつ In fact I'm the only designer at my company that uses an apple monitor, they've got sony's and toshibas.

Cnet had a great comparison article showing what each brand did better then the others but Cnet's site is so unmanageable it's impossible to find anything there.

Ars just posted about apples recent moniters too, http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/8/8/4918

[Spriggan]

Anywho enough about monitors, I'm adding Technorati tag support to the blog and was wondering if there were any other like features I'm missing for it?  I don't completely follow all the blogging stuff so I assume RSS 2.0 (which I'm moving to actual XML instead of a php script that generates it) but I don't know if I need an atom script, heck I don't even know anyone that uses atom.

So let me just ask that?  Anyone use Atom instead of RSS and want that?