The blog is still in a state of slight flux although the layout is pretty close to where I want it. The main part is the gallery which still needs some over hauling work. I expect to finish work on the CSS for the main portion of the gallery this week (its been slow going with work and traveling). After that its time to work over the gallery templates (remember smarty?) I did get the upgrade done to the gallery and it resolved all of the problems I was experiencing. I also cleaned up the directory structure internal to the site and did some other maintanence. I also installed and setup a nice instance of awstats (more on that later).
You may or may not have noticed, but I am working on the layout for my blog. I decided to modify the CSS and header graphics from the Classic Word Press theme which you see now. I’ve added to skip links for accessibility as I think that is important. Skip links help people move straight to the content of the post. I’ll be looking at adding more features to make the site accessible as time goes on. Word Press already has pretty good support for accessibility. They use the correct type of navigation (list based) and tag their links. I included a nice header replacement I got from somewhere at A List Apart (I can’t find the exact link, but it looks like this:
#masthead, #masthead span{
width: 640px;
height: 70px;
cursor: pointer;
cursor: hand;
background: #B6965A url(images/masthead.jpg) no-repeat right top;
}
.replace{
position: relative;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
/* hide overflow:hidden from IE5/Mac */
/* */
overflow: hidden;
/* */
}
.replace span{
display:block;
position:absolute;
top:0px;
left:0px;
z-index:1; /*for Opera 5 and 6*/
}
The replace and replace span causes the text title to be squished to nothing, but still visible to a text based reader. This degrades very nicely. If I credited the wrong source, hopefully someone will let me know and I will fix the link and cite the proper author.
Please excuse the construction and feel free to leave any comments you have about the redesign. The gallery is next on the hit list. I really like the
carbon theme so I am considering basing my modifications on that theme instead of what I am currently using (
Word Press Gallery 2 Embedded standard theme).
My current setup is
Word Press with
Gallery 2. There are currently some problems with the gallery install (hopefully not apparent to the end users!). These will likely be fixed with an upgrade to the Gallery 2 installation over the next few weeks.
There will be an update related to this before Friday! Thanks for reading.