Bit O’ Tweaking, Again

I’ve done a little tweaking here on Graphically Speaking. Usability, aesthetics, and typography have been given a little more attention. Have you noticed any difference?

Comment Header

Each comment has a colored header that flip-flops with every other comment. I thought the comment area needed some hierarchy without changing the text size or placement. Something that also fit well into this revision is a comment number, so I did it.

I was going to use MTFlipFlop, like Hicks, but on the first and second try it didn’t work. I’m not sure what was wrong, but I didn’t feel like debugging the problem. I made a simple PHP script that counts the number of comments, figures out if the comment is even or odd, and finally applies the appropriate style. It’s about the most I delve into PHP, but it is not hard to do.

sIFR

A healthy amount of blogs have been using IFR for some of the content. I was not to sure how much was involved in the whole “conversion”, but I wanted to just jump right in. Mike Davidson’s article on sIFR 2.0 made it seem quite easy. The instructions are as follows:

1. Download 2.0 Release Candidate. sIFR is licensed free of charge under the standard CC-GNU LGPL.
2. Get familiar with index.html. That’s really the only file which contains the things you’ll need to adapt. It contains the replace statements at the bottom and the CSS at the top.
3. To make your own .swf files, simply open up the .fla file in Flash, doubleclick the textbox which is on stage (it takes up the whole stage), and choose your own font from the Properties palette. Then, choose File > Export and you’re done!

The parameters to use in your replacement functions are explained in the html file. Plug in your parameters and you’re good to go! Not too hard, I thought to myself. In reality it was not hard, it took me about an hour to download, customize, and debug my customizations. It was well worth the time. I think the typography change makes a big difference.

Sticky Navigation

For the sake of usability I have always been meaning to make my navigation sticky, meaning the link shows the user if you are on one of the main pages. That used a bit o’ PHP too. A little PHP goes a long way.

Is it an improvement?

Do you think I could make any other changes, not necessarily just design wise? Are the changes for the better?