Maintenance Mode

Excuse the mess, I'm working on the site design today. It's been a really long week with a bunch of cool things going on that I'll let you in on later. We had breakfast this morning at the diner and then later this afternoon it's the McClellanville, Lowcountry Shrimp Festival and Blessing of the Fleet! Last night I redesigned this site and since we caught up on yard work and part of the afternoon is going to be outside, I'm going to spend the rest of the weekend tinkering with the design of this site.. so, excuse the mess and if you want to see every article post and page of this website just do this search.

Here's what i'm thinking with the design.
The old one is too boring.. I just took a look at Ma.tt's and it's nice to switch em up..especially for spring. Old one was to Maze-ish, so this one i want all the links and nav within a 400 x 50 bar area with drop downs to conserve space. I had an overly customized design beforehand.. relying on too much hard coding in the php to be flexible and dynamic with all of the pages.. and I also have media formatted up to 800px wide and very little formatting within the post. I also had no images on the front page.. and while I liked the minimalist approach.. like most folks, I don't spend much time on a site and I like to be able to quickly navigate post with thumbnails.. I really like the layout of the nytimes because it is easy to navigate quickly....so that's what i'm going for. I also want a visual thumbnail on every element that links to that article or page...I don't want to have to manually create all of these thumbs for every article and to do this, I'm using the custom fields in wp. I've started by stripping down a version of Brian Gardner's Revolution design. I like it.. it's clean and has a good structure to work with. I still liked the navigation features of the old design showing only headlines as the results to searches and archives...adding archive info in breadcrumbs is a bonus, but I like the navigation structure of the old archives, so i rewrote the php for about ten of the fifteen template files and added some additional files and removed the right sidebar elements to handle some of the larger images, video and flash. This will give me an area to showcase flash designs without having to edit the source code to switch the files out every so often. I brought the whole thing out to 1020px wide..so I didn't have to edit those files to fit and the average screen resolutions are going up quickly with my analytics showing an average size of higher than 1040px nowadays. (**they're also getting smaller with mobile.. so i added another css for mobile that will be detected by a browser sniffer which has a clean iphone/ipod touch display) in fact.. i got all of these browser agents covered: Elaine/3.0, iPhone, Palm, EudoraWeb, Blazer, AvantGo, Windows CE, Cellphone, Small, MMEF20, Danger, hiptop, Proxinet, ProxiNet, Newt, PalmOS, NetFront, SHARP-TQ-GX10, SonyEricsson, SymbianOS, UP.Browser, UP.Link, TS21i-10, MOT-V, portalmmm, DoCoMo, Opera Mini, Palm, Handspring, Nokia, Kyocera, Samsung, Motorola, Mot, Smartphone, Blackberry, WAP, SonyEricsson, PlayStation Portable, LG, MMP,OPWV, Symbian, EPOC...

And this also gives a good chance to do some mobile editing of the site, which will be good sometimes. I'm used to surfing sites on the iphone, but it can be a pain when the site is not formatted for mobile.
It only makes sense to have a design that is appropriate for each screen size. I want to some functionality to the browser css that may work with the all screen resolutions since some of you may do our surfing on the wall and not the laptop. With that in mind, as far as video is concerned.. I debated Brightcove and Vimeo for some time as i don't want to serve up the video entirely from my server. Both have good HD capabilities, but brightcove is much easier to manage a lineup and syndicate players. Brightcove seems to have better javascript and actionscript api's for using they're setup and vimeo won't let you embed HD..to give the player expanded functionality in presenting materials. I'm not to hip on having to jump the player to full screen in order to view a larger version of the video and in this case, I can use the full screen button to format the video into the exact area..920px... of the featured part of the site without sacrificing any additional area to navigate videos.
Of the overall redesign.. I think the strong points are the javascript tabs on the front page, the thumbnail navigation and condensing the navigation to a smaller navbar.

Now... i've got this one error in a bit of javascript in the header... once that one error is fixed it's completely w3c valid for the xhtml and css. I'll be adding some additional pages so that you don't have to sort through my other site to get information on what I do.... and I'll be finishing up this article along with the design.