bramn

bramn v3.5

Ever since the release of my former layout I have been, like said before, unsatisfied with especially the colour scheme. The blue and brownish colors never really suited me and didn't really fit into the sequence of orange designs I had before, which is my favourite colour I guess. So, almost immediately after the release note/post of v3.0 I started working on a new design, in which primarily the CSS and not so much XHTML was the victim of my endless tinkering and tweaking. Ultimately this is the result, not the final, cause in my view it will never be finished. So hope you like it and all, if you are interested read on for a changelog.

Live Search and AJAX libraries

So the general layout or grid, as you might call it, didn't change that much. Most of the work went into Photoshopping, CSS and Javascript/AJAX coding, tweaking icons, etc. AJAX you say? Yes, the standard search function for Pivot has been extended to a neat 'Live Search'. So no need to hit the enter key or click 'GO' anymore. Just type and wait for your results.

Marco already developed a live search function for Pivot a while ago, using the Prototype library in combination with script.aculo.us for the effects. However since the Pivot team made a choice for Thickbox and thus the jQuery library as an extension for image popups I made an attempt of porting Marco's javascript to work with the jQuery library. And it works! Hopefully I will ever come around to making a tutorial for other Pivot users on how to implement it yourself.

Del.icio.us integration

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, where you can keep, share and discover bookmarks from yourself and others. And since I tend to bookmark (using del.icio.us) a lot lately for my work as i-TRIXX freelancer and just out of interest, I might as well share it with you by posting the 8 or so latest additions on my frontpage. Subscribers to my RSS feed might already have noticed the daily updates with added links to my del.icio.us account and any article can now be saved to your own del.icio.us account

Other (minor) changes

so those were the big changes next to ofcourse the obvious visual ones. Let me list some of the other minor less important tweaks and alterations:

• The seperate sections for 'Non-/Makes Sense' posts were merged back together with the rest. Why? Well, because I updated the secondary section more often than the primary section. Meaning the updates would probably not be noticed, because they were outside the initial viewport of the visitor.
• Pivot was ofcourse and will always be updated to the latest version.
• The Trackback functionality has been dropped, not too much of a surprise since nobody was using it anyways.
• Recent comments with Gravatar (Globally Recognized AVATAR) support has been added to the frontpage. Hopefully this month people, who do not have a gravatar account yet, will be able to sign-up for one.
• Aaaah yes, the 8 most recent photos from my Flickr account can now also be viewed from my frontpage, don't get scared when I drop by.
• The Archives is now called History, as an 'honour' to Microsoft, which I now don't use anymore (A)!

I think that's about it actually. I know the whole layout and high contrast colour scheme is not that original anymore in the blogosphere. A lot of nowadays weblog templates use the combination of vertical content in columns and lists vs. horizontally oriented grid/layout. Also the large, maximum width, footers with all kinds of lists with f.i. previous entries, is pretty standard now. But it ain't all about the design, it is content what counts, and that is what I have to work on first. And who knows, maybe I'll come up with another original template in the future.