Posts Tagged ‘meta’
0Just when I thought things were going swimmingly and I was all set to post all the time in here, my kind host Alex was unfortunate enough to experience a database meltdown. He managed to get most things back on board, it but it looks like some data was lost in the process… for one, my categories seem to have disappeared. Now all the posts are category-less, and the category main pages are totally blank. I’ll work on fixing this in the next few days, although progress might be slow as I’m trying to spend every waking non-job-related moment working on my grad school applications. Ee!
After two months of graphical hackery, and some awesome Wordpress modding by Yang, my new blog redesign is finally done!
(Jia, you will be happy to know that now I only have seven or so other things to distract me from Immersion.)
The new design features some rather random headers that I doodled up on a whim. As the rewritten about page explains, the main header is really just an excuse to have a flying unicorn. And now I have one and can go to sleep happy.
The new redesign is also a reorganization—now the blog is divided into 4 (soon to be 5) categories that can each act as their own topical mini-blog. The categories are:
- Art & Design – This is where I’ll put all my ramblings about visual culture, new artists and designers that I like, and musings about the role of art and design in my life and society. It made sense to combine them into one category because I still firmly believe that they have more similarities than differences.
- Adventures in Code – This is where I keep track of all the AS3 things I learn and would otherwise forget while on the path to Flash guru-hood. I might also put entries about HTML and CSS in here if I write any, even if those things aren’t technically “code.” Basically anything related to web and interaction design would go here, but mostly AS3 knowledge. The splatters in the header are supposed to be coffee stains, because I guess I associate code with coffee-guzzling nerd-dom, or something. =)
- Sandbox – I am still working on the layout for this last one, so it’s not ready yet. Not that there would be many entries in it if it were. I intend to put sketches, half-finished ideas, and experiments here. Mostly I came up with this section as a way to force myself to draw more, to learn more through the act of doing than passively reading/looking.
- Noshings – This is the reincarnation of my long-lost food blog with Yang. I promise to post more regularly this time.
- Life, the Universe, and Everything (Else) – Exactly what it sounds like.
There are still some loose ends to tie up here and there, like I haven’t paid much attention to coming up with a consistent, elegant way to include images, bulleted lists, recipes, and code chunks in the entries themselves. I spend way too much dealing with all the theme elements that I usually never get around to these. But this time I will!
I also have to go back and re-tag all my posts because Yang figured out a way to make the tag cloud filter tags based on the category you are in, and the intra-category clouds are looking more like the cirrus variety than fluffy cumulonimbi.
That’s it for now. I promise to blog more again, now that I’m not working behind the scenes. Night night!
I’ve finally gotten around to rearranging my blog layout!
For a long time the old one was bothering me. For one, in a large maximized window, a huge empty white gap would open up in the middle. I also disliked the typeface for the title (which I kinda picked halfheartedly… which I’m told you should never do if you’re any bit serious about design. Oops. =)). Lastly, the repeating halftone dot pattern on the left side wasn’t perfectly lined up (barely noticeable but it bothered me nonetheless).
In this iteration, one of my goals was to make some room for additional informational/navigational elements. But I wanted to maintain the basic idea of the old one, which was that this should be as basic and simple as a blog could get, stripped down to little more than entries + a tag cloud as a primary means of navigation.
It’s done, the new blog design.
With this new blog design, I’ve officially become Trendy. (I mean come on, my halftone dots have halftone dots.)
The truth is that I wanted to play around with Photoshop and Illustrator all day because I got a little jealous of all those sinfully beautiful illustration-rich web designs out there. The ones that put my minimalist concept-driven “Huh? Explain it to me again?” Museum School ideas to aesthetic shame. So I ended up creating a pixellated mess, kinda just to prove that I could.
