Folks, over the weekend, I made some minor design tweaks to the website. Why? let me explain. The work pressure at Business 2.0, and constant blogging were making things a tad hairy. I was enjoying the process less and less, and feeling that perhaps I should give it all up. Russell calls it blog fatigue. That was only a lingering though, but it scared me into thinking negatively. That bothered me. But that was not the only reason. In an earlier post I had lamented that it was tough to keep the original reporting and writing separated from the quick-hit blog postings. I have come-up with a band-aid solution, to separate the long posts and original stories from the “quickies.” Mike helped me with this and had to use all sorts of includes, and plug-ins, and some design changes to make it all work.
The left column is where anything that ranges over 350 words is going to show-up. I have called this the “featured” section. You will get the four most recent big-pieces in this section. The middle column, is now a daily journal, where I would include interesting links, short opinions and well sometimes personal musings. I have pushed the old middle column to the very extreme right of the page, which is where all the navigation stuff, and archives etc. are going to reside. The new Daily Journal is something I think you folks are going to realize. Over next few days, I would revive the “recently posted” section, and blogroll.
Like all reporters, I have an analog daily blotter, where I take notes, jot down thoughts, and well draw noodles. Instead of doing it on paper, I am going to do it offline. This will also give me a chance to link to other more meaningful posts in the blogsphere. Sometimes, a link and a line is more than most. By the way, the categories are all the same. Nothing different. Just take your eye to the middle of the page more often!
Now if you are reading this through an RSS Feed Reader such as Net News Wire, you probably won’t notice any difference. The design change is more for the browser-based readers. I am not sure what you folks think, but I guess this minor-mod, is going to make UI more reader-friendly.
13 comments so far
7:08 PM PT
Further tweaking is in order for other browsers. If you try Firefox, you’ll see that it’s rather screwed…good luck!
7:48 PM PT
Firefox on Mac or PC. I’m using the 1.0 preview release and it looks fine to me.
7:53 PM PT
i am using it on firefox on mac and safari on mac and it looks good on both. hmmm!
8:33 PM PT
also try refreshing the browser - if you are using a mac, do shift+refresh. cache is pretty hard on most macs
8:36 PM PT
Fyi,
Firefox 1.0 PR on Fedora Core 2, and the two columns have no center spacing between them. They don’t overlap, but they are right next to each other.
PS. Who ever said “write once, run everywhere” … (tic)
8:47 PM PT
Charlie, I am assuming this is happening on either a windows or a linux machine. because i am not finding any bugs on the mac so far. just wondering what’s going on. hopefully it should be fixed soon enough …. sorry about that
9:50 PM PT
Yeah, its Linux.
Fyi, “Fedora Core” is the new name of RedHat’s (do you see the inside? joke) free linux version.
TMI, I know.
Google should be releasing their desktop search product for Mac pretty soon, let us know how you like. For the linux crowd Beagle is even better than GDS because it searches PDFs.
10:20 PM PT
Hmm that is odd but I’ll try to fix it. Let me know if the columns are still messed up by the end of tomorrow.
12:46 AM PT
The first time I opened the site on Firefox PR today, it seemed all messed up, with just two columns appearing right next to each other. But I refreshed the browser as one comment suggested and its all fine now. Thanks.
5:31 AM PT
Don’t give up the blog, man. I read this thing every day when I get to work and find it very insightful.
7:27 AM PT
Om, Mike,
I just loaded your page and it was screwed, but then I hit refresh like others have mentioned and the page come to life.
Very nice design, with the gray column, etc.
Only one nit, some of us readers do run big monitors and high resolutions, so if you could use floating width CSS columns to suck up all the space that is usually the best experience.
Keep up the good work.
8:40 AM PT
That’s a good idea. I’ll try making the left column elastic instead of fixed width, just so people with bigger screens can read the content easier.
I wish there was a way to force browsers to redownload the CSS file, because many people are viewing the cached old copy and it doesn’t work with the new layout because I changed some of the HTML.
If anybody knows of a trick, e-mail me or post it here.
9:57 AM PT
browers, after all these years are an inexact science. charlie, thanks for your comments, and sorry about the mix-up.
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