Fresh look for 2009
5th January 2009 at 18:31
The arty bit
It had to be youthful, masculine, vibrant, fun and cheeky, and suggest a bleeding edge/prototype vibe. The layout had to be modular and be flexible enough to allow variation in both the amount and type of content that I might choose to add. Inspiration came from fluorescent lighting and retro computer interfaces.
A dark background allows the vibrant green and blue combination to pop, using green for internal content and navigation and blue to suggest integration with other sources. The white content area with pink headings and links provides a more restful reading experience and gives space to what might otherwise be too overpowering. I've pimped the minimalist, functional feel with solid blocks of contrasting colour and subtle shades to indicate chunks of content.
ExpressionEngine
It's a pretty standard ExpressionEngine configuration. One weblog for the blog, another for btw articles, each with a handful of custom fields. I'm using Solspace's Tag module for tagging, the Magpie plugin for RSS parsing, the Randomizer plugin for randomness (see if you can spot it) and Twitter Timeline for my Twitter feed.
Tagging
Both blog and btw articles are tagged. Much the same as the old site, each tag page aggregates any articles with that tag, together with any recent additions to my Ma.gnolia account. I pull in Ma.gnolia RSS feeds for individual tags using Magpie. On each article page, I populate the meta keywords element with a list of the tags associated with that article.
The global tag cloud, while providing access to my most frequently used tags, is actually hard-coded. I wanted to retain control over this so that I have the option of promoting certain above others tags, regardless of the number articles associated with each. The order of tags in the cloud is currently arbitrary.
Elsewhere
I wanted to provide links to my various online haunts and also pull in any useful up-to-date content. As on the old site, I'm using Magpie to display my most recent bookmarks from Ma.gnolia and Digg but I've added a feed from Last.fm showing what I've been listening to, however embarrassing that might be. (It's worth mentioning this solution for a problem encountered with the Last.fm feed.)
Rather than display this content exclusively on the homepage, I've now made this a feature in the footer on every page.
RDF and Microformats
My short intro biog that appears on every page contains a combination of hCard and – by way of experimentation - RDFa FOAF markup, identifying properties such as my name, job title, blog URI, employer's URI and location.
Ma.gnolia and Digg bookmarks are always listed in xFolk and links to external pages that describe me (my profiles on other sites) include XFN's rel="me" attribute. Where tags are listed that describe the current page, I use the rel="tag" microformat to identify those keywords.
Validation
Keen standardistas among you will notice that it doesn't validate. I'm playing with technologies which, while their adoption is being actively encouraged, are not yet formally standardised or their implementation is still awkward. Take away the ARIA and RDFa markup and it's actually perfectly strict XHTML. Honest.
