Topic: OldManPants

Alrighty.. been workin' a bit on something new lately, which I've been hesitant to post here to get torn apart, but what the hell... I'm not huge on the whole blog thing, but I finally broke down and had to make one - mostly for the sake of making it.

http://oldmanpants.ca *cringes*

For the most part, the different styles suck so far, but I've been playing around with the last one (the current default) and I think it's starting to come around. What I'm happiest with so far is certainly not content, and not really the designs yet, but the PHP that is running the site. I've worked with PHP a lot, but have recently been developing a new method (no, not 'method' as in a group of Java statements with a name) for myself of building sites that is highly object oriented and low-maintenance.

All of the PHP that drives the site is completely my own, and I have a few buddies that would like to use it for their sites, so I'm working on cleaning it up a bit so they can install it on their servers, add stylesheets and run with it.

anyhoo, Just looking for a few thoughts about the whole thing from some folks who know what they're doing.

oh- I looked at it last night in IE5 and it broke a bit, so I'll be working on that...

I like, actually. The current style in particular is very simple and straightforward, and is probably my favorite.

When I launched my own site last year, I too had the style switching buttons down at the bottom. A reader suggested that I put them up top so people had the option of changing styles before they read the content, not after. What a novel idea, I thought, and I ended up putting the style buttons at both the top and the bottom (my site ended up being vertically symmetrical in terms of menus, etc.). I would recommend the same thing to you--see if you can't find a place at the top for those buttons.

Odd sentence at the top of the archives page... "The crap nobody read the first time, but they can come not read it here at their leasure."

Oh, I also found it a bit odd that the date appears at the bottom of the entry rather than the top. That kind of flies in the face of conventional wisdom--not that flying in the face of conventional wisdom is always a bad thing, but here I can see it leading to confusion, and that usually is a bad thing.

Your "about" page confirms what you said about being happiest with the code... bam, right there from the start, we get "how is the site built, you ask?" I don't know about you, but when I go to a site the first thing I ask myself is usually not "I wonder how this site was built...." I'm not saying that you can't order the content on your about page however you want, of course. I'm just saying that I found it a bit odd to have the code stuff come first. Personal opinion, that's all--doesn't really mean much.

Other than that, well, it's a blog.

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Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | Keeper of the Juicy Bits

Suho pretty much covered my thoughts on the page. You should add a little title or something to make it clearer that the style switcher is a styleswitcher. Right now it is only a couple of icons, and only reason I figured that it was a style switcher was becasue I knew there was supposed to be one there.

On the 'about' page the list items used in the overview are bigger than the rest of the text. You should use the same font and size on both the ordinary text and the lists, unless you have a good reason for changing it.

The code looks good as well. Seems to be sematicly correct from what I saw of it

I would love to have a look at the php code you used for the page. Always enjoy seeing how other people code their pages.

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"
- the Golden Ratio - Vim Tutorial -

cool... thanks

Will be working on those little confusing bits with the dates and styleswitcher. As far as the code goes, I could have it xhtml strict, but i got into a bad habit of wanting external links to open in a new window some years ago. it's either the non-validating target attribute or a sloppy js workaround. i hate workarounds. I should just open the links in the same window i suppose.

changed the order on the about page.

one of the things i'd like to do on the site is write a bit about how I create the site with php, because i like to see how other people code their pages too and would like to share my methods.

well I'm gettin kicked off this computer so I'll go home and work on the site some more i suppose. thanks for looking and taking the time to reply.

alright, so I've been working a bit on it. Got a new style up. Still need some work on all of the styles in my opinion, but I've been adding new features to the site as well...

for the blog entries i've thought a lot about it and i think i'm gonna keep the date at the bottom, but it doesn't work for the new oldman briefs... they're too short and the date looks like it belongs to the next entry sorta.

I think the styles can fit up top maybe though.. but i'm not too concerned about it... I'd like to keep things simple and tidy up top, and most of the styles are crap anyways.. its usually the latest - which is always set to the default - that is the best.

now what i need more than anything I think is good content... which i think to start will be in the form of a quick runthrough of how I've gone about building the site in PHP

cheers

If you could make it scale it would be very nice. The size is now fixed, this means big fat black borders on 1024*768 and missing things when looking through a small window. It's not a biggie but it could be the finishing touch.
Overall it looks good.

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Do something usefull: support Justice for Pat Richard

(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 05-18-2004 09:46)

I like the new style... quite clean and pretty.

I do not like the internal borders on the pics... but that's personal preference, I suppose.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | Keeper of the Juicy Bits

I've stumbled on a bug. I opened up the comments for your Cuba pictures. Then I changed the style and got this error...

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /raid/home/jolly/oldman/oldmanpants/comments.php on line 20

Looks like an error checking bug to me.

Thanks Paul, was a problem in passing a variable (the page to return to after switching styles). Should all be good now. As for having it scalable, I almost always look at it through a 1600x1200 window... but yes, maybe a future style will be fliud and scalable... that's the beauty of css

Looks good!

Agree with Suho (again ) about the picture borders. It looks as if the pictures should have been cropped at the border, but for some reason you decided to only leave the border there to indicate where the cut should have been.

Just out of curiousity; what part of the page did you use Lightwave for? Saw it was listed on the about page...

Wouldn't mind if you added some more about how the php code behind the page

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"
- the Golden Ratio - Vim Tutorial -