Ten Tonne Baby!

Where's Mama?

Archive for the my sites tag

• EmbeddedStream Mobile Version

  

  After learning that I have at least one occasional mobile using accessing the site (yes Jimmy, that’s you!) I’ve put in place a much more appropriate stylesheet, linked in with the handheld media type. I’ve been testing this against Opera – pressing Shift-F11 will switch Opera to handheld mode and will emulate it’s rendering behaviour when running on a mobile device. I think overall it works pretty well. Some of the features include…

  • Only 2 images in the design, and these are mini, mini images (3K each)
  • Single column fluid layout
  • More appropriate text sizing and margins
  • Better sizing of form controls

  I don’t really know enough about how widely the handheld media type has been adopted by mobile browsers, but I guess at least Opera crops up all over the place and it will render really nicely. Any feedback from my one mobile user would be appreciated

  While I was in the mood I’ve also added a print stylesheet, so think I should now be covered all round. I might have a little rant about Aural media type shortly, but will save that treat for another day.

  Posted:

  December 11, 2007 @ 9:06

  Categories:

  Personal

  Tags:

  browser, Design, handheld, mobile, my sites, opera, rendering

  Comments:

  2 comments so far

• Shiny New Site

  Well, shiny refined site. There are a number of things that have been bugging me about the embeddedstream site for a while, but I haven’t really had an opportunity to address them. Well, now I have.

  Some of the issues I had were…

  • I didn’t feel like the main content pages were particularly legible or easy to read
  • There was a lot of guff and noise around that wasn’t necessary
  • The homepage wasn’t very useful
  • There are lots of posts (about 160) that are not very discoverable

  Based on these gripes, I’ve reworked the site. The changes include…

  • Homepage now consists of recent posts with full content
  • Style changes to make text more readable
  • Simplified the design and removed any unnecessary noise (both in content and design)
  • Added tagging support, and tagged all posts to make content discoverable

  The main thing really is tagging, which now part of the core Wordpress product (from version 2.3 I think). I was always a little skeptical based on fads and fashion, but if you have a large amount of content it’s a really powerful way to find things you’re looking for.

  Have a look around and let me know how well the new shoes fit. Also if anyone knows anything about tagging support within Windows Live Writer, or the MetaWeblog API then let me know. At the moment I’m writing content in Live Writer, then updating tags in Wordpress.

  Posted:

  December 10, 2007 @ 9:12

  Categories:

  Development

  Tags:

  my sites, redesign, wordpress

  Comments:

  5 comments so far

• Sunday Photos

  I thought it might be interesting to post up a few of the raw photos from the shoot on Sunday to compare to the finished site design. In particular this is the original image that was used for the site header before mucking about with it and getting the crayons out. As before, you can check out the finished design at kimelliott.net

  Posted:

  September 12, 2006 @ 22:37

  Categories:

  Design, Personal

  Tags:

  Design, kim elliott, my sites, photography

  Comments:

  2 comments so far

• New Site Finished

  I spent Sunday morning rolling around on various London pavements with a camera. My girlfriend is a very talented writer, and I’ve been meaning to put together a site to support her work for some time. I had a few ideas about how the design could develop, so we packed up a bag of suitable shoes for modelling and took to the streets of London.

  Unfortunately the kind of shots I was after involved being at ground level, which got a few odd glances. The main image we ended up using was taken lying on the concrete in the middle of the road (Lower Regent Street) looking up towards Picadilly Circus. I was happily surprised how much fun it is to run around London behaving strangely.

  Having returned home with an array of design fodder, I spent a few hours coming up with the visual design incorporating the photos from the earlier session. Eager to keep up the momentum I spent the evening building the site which went public around 1:00.

  The results can be seen at kimelliott.net. I love how it feels to start from nothing and finish a design just based on materials you make yourself. I’ll definately try to work this way in the future.

  Posted:

  September 11, 2006 @ 22:23

  Categories:

  Design, Personal

  Tags:

  kim elliott, my sites

  Comments:

  4 comments so far

• Stream 1.1

  OK, I’ve uploaded some minor changes to the site. The initial design looked nice in Photoshop, but the navigation didn’t work particularly well for long content pages. Hopefully this version should make things much easier.

  Feel free to let me know how you feel about the new version. If things look a little strange, try doing a hard refresh – some of the image files have changed, so you’ll need ditch the cached versions.

  Right, my eyes are fuzzy – time to sleep…

  Posted:

  May 26, 2006 @ 23:30

  Categories:

  Design

  Tags:

  my sites, redesign

  Comments:

  2 comments so far