Proposed logo

From what I was working with, the mid section was still a blur to me on how it should look and it’s been so long since I’ve peeked at the code behind WordPress. Sure I’ve been sandbox testing out the various WP versions that came out since v2.04 but nothing has been put live until now. This has been the main reason why it has taken me so long to redo my site layout–from scratch. That and the usual where you code and code or edit images until you mess everything up. Then clean things up and mess it up again in a seemingly endless cycle that produces absolutely nothing and your creativity spark and interest for the original design wains.

I even had a little logo going that had flourishes like steam above the “7” in the “72”, but it was done in Paint Shop Pro 5.01 (an ancient version, I know). In order to really have a logo that is expandable it should be created as a .svg with layers and in a larger scale than what I need. Easier done in the GIMP or Inkscape. That way the logo can be adjusted to what ever smaller size I need without the problems with transparency.

The next-to-final mockup of the header graphic.

Midsection mockup for Categories and Tags.

New mockup theme (Reincarnation of a site):
I decided to just hunker down and settle with modifying the Sandbox theme from plaintxt.org. Besides my last theme was an altered Sandbox as well. This will be much more productive in the long run since I don’t have to spend so much time learning and re-learning the tags and loops or figuring out how things should be displayed. Sure there is a lot of pride in creating your own theme from scratch but if you keep getting brain farts and lulls of productivity it’s time to embrace fate, settle and admit your losses and failures and gear your goals into smaller sized chunks so you can move on to other things.

As for the current incarnation of the site:
The old design was based on the Chinese Year of the Rat 鼠 (shú, lo shu…). This was replaced with a Japanese theme and 朱 (しゅ, shiyu, shu) which is Japanese for vermilion, cinnabar, scarlet, red, bloody color. Plus…red/crimson is my favorite color. So it’s a minimalist theme with a touch of red.

Last theme and new theme; above fold

Sure, just about anyone can create a snazzy looking website, but this goal of rebooting is to help spread the word on keeping up with the web standards (along with promoting CSS and the designers website as well).

Soon there will new fresh designs out there to make you lower your jaw to the floor in amazement and go, “Aww, man! I wish I though of that”. There’s no prizes or gifts for participating, just a satisfying recognition that does the ego good.

1. It no longer looks the way it should after changing things around
2. It’s beyond code repair after hours, if not days, of tweaking.
3. It no longer looks right—must come up with something better.

Then the vicious cycle continues from the beginning. Stumbling across a website a few weeks ago, (I forget which one), helped me to realize that I’m not the only one with this problem of a “fix it ‘till it’s broken” mentality in designing. It makes me feel so much better about myself to know that there are a multitude of others who’ve had layouts/designs that went from looking cool but modest to looking like a $2 hooker with way too much makeup on—really trashy and increasingly butt ugly to boot. I still have trouble learning how to step back from a layout project before it grows stale on me.

Yesterday, I came across this article titled DRAG-ing Your Design Down – How To Style Yourself To Anonymity by Some Random Dude (that’s the name of the site). The author gave a long post about his opinion of the ongoing trend of Web2.0’s Drop-shadows, Rounded corners, And Gradients earlier this year. His site, for contrast, is rather minimal but still packs visual punch. It reminded me of one of my old weblog#8217;s minimalistic layout style of a white background and very little of the bling that is prominent with the Web2.0 design trend.

I’m also guilty of the rounded corners style with the main part of my old website, but it can only be viewed in certain browsers because it is created using a Mozilla specific CSS property -moz-border-radius. Oh well, the spaceman and alien with gray colors theme of mine is quite a few years old by-the-way. Now for this site there is only a minor gradient for the background of the entries which I hope fits in nicely with the design.

The article has inspired me to just stick with my old weblog design. Never mind the bollocks¹ bling-bling. Hopefully by the end of this week this site will be graced with a slightly re-vamped layout of my old weblog. This should finally allow me to concentrate on other projects.

In comparison, the Default (the older Kubrick) theme has 17 .php files and Classic theme has 6 .php files. K2 on the other hand has 40+ .php files, about 9 javascript files (I included the .js files set in .php files here but did not include them in the .php count). This includes Script.aculo.us’ Prototype framework v1.5.0_rc0. Presented in K2 as a javascript file set into a .php page weighting in at 56KB. I guess this is not to bad since the updated v1.5.0_rc1 would most likely jack the .php page weight up to 64KB!

Not every file in K2 has to be used since it is possible to turn some features off in its theme control panel. A lot of these included functions, modules and possible plugin inclusions I’m not using yet and some may never be used. I really have no need for Flickr and don’t even have an account. I’ll also have to trim some of the extra if, else, and if function_exists out not due to extra weight to the files but because the stuff is not being use and to help ease the script reading and finding of the things I do use.

I’ll be studying the both K2 and Script.aculo.us files for awhile so I can figure out something lighter in weight and a different theme since I’m not use to using someone else’s straight out of the box layout. Hopefully I can come up with my own layout sometime soon.