It has been pretty quiet on these shores over the past few weeks. The winter took us in, a bit of rest was badly needed. I’ve been working on a few articles on typography and particularly Japanese typography on the web, on some more advanced layout techniques. But the mood wasn’t really there. Besides the winter blues, I’m not entirely happy with the layout and the look and feel of this site. The two column format feels more than a bit constipated; the fixed width puts heavy limits on the scaling. This fixed width wasn’t originally planned at all, but it ended this way, due to the numerous problems encountered with IEW while coding a liquid, source ordered layout. In the end, some laziness took over, and I settled for some fairly fixed thing. This has to change ! (hopefully soon…).
I’ve been working on a couple of ideas, in the end I’ll settled on a one column layout, intending to make text the primary focus, scalable to taste, and avoiding all those distracting artefacts that usually populate ‘sidebars’ of all types. Graphic effects (aka. the background images) will be reduced to an absolute minimum, at least in a first stage. After all, this is the year of text.
While the core is ready to go, I still have to find some time to make it decent looking for IEW, and I’m holding of a bit due to the imminent release of Textpattern 1.0, which, on the surface won’t be much different from the latest release candidates, but will offer some interesting improvements behind the scenes, as far as security goes, URL management, and the endless problem of comment s–p–a–m. On this latest subject, the web has been full of buzz and discussions about that new attribute introduced by major search engines: rel="nofollow". I’ve implemented this here, on a temporary basis at the moment. I’m not at all convinced that this is the solution for the problem. While it might help somewhat to alleviate the flood, the problem won’t go away at all. Some comments by professionals in the field seem to corroborate this.
Meanwhile, while musing around in hibernation, and struggling through the bitter Siberian storm that has been blowing around the house the last few days, the world is still turning around. That little community on the web has been up in arms on some subjects…, I’ve been told. Someone ‘sold the Vault’ (I still have to search on that particular subject), and the departure of a top programmer to another employer are subjects that led to some wild speculations. And today, I had the shock of my life while following everybody’s advice and had a look at the redesigned MSN.com. That site actually looks better when viewed with Firefox then when seen with IEW running on VPC/Win2K. Would there really be some truths in those stories that MS people are using Firefox as there default browser ?? Hmm, intense speculations… One can always dream a bit…
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