CHECKITOUTCHECKITOUT

My old site isn’t back yet, because like I’ve been saying, Oktagone is fucking awful, but in the meantime, I’ve redesigned my website and it revolves around LiveJournal, meaning the index page will point to my latest entries page. But check out the new design! Please give me criticism. Should I restrict its width? Does the background show up as white and then grey? Any other problems?
Seeing’s I haven’t updated for more than a week, I might as well say what’s been goings-on.
I’m on spring break this week. I’m trying to make the best of my time, unlike what I did over Winter Break, where I sat in front of the PS2 for two weeks, going through both Final Fantasy X-2 and Jak II. Despite the fact that I only had one final, my classes ended pretty well.
Story about finals: I don’t know where the hell I heard this, but someone was dumb enough to tell me (or maybe I was dumb enough to believe) that my computer science final would be on Monday at 8 AM. It wasn’t too big of a deal that I woke up at 6:30 to get ready for the inexistent final, but it was a big deal to find out that it was ACTUALLY at the complete opposite time – Thursday at 4 PM, the last finals period. This sorta screwed up Bay Area transportation plans and everything… but then again, it wasn’t a big deal. I went downtown with friends, played DDR, played a lot of FFXI, etc. And then come Friday, I was packed up and picked up by my mom and her friend Tim, with whom I went to the boardwalk, had Chinese, and talked about Ren and Stimpy. 🙂
The night that I got home, I got frantic messages from, like, everyone. Seems that Ron decided to stop by in Marin much sooner than I thought – like, the same day that we all returned from college. Unfortunately, driving directions were quite fudged, and he found himself in SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO. But yeah, one way or another, he found his way to San Rafael and got to my house. And the weekend was spent hanging with friends, seeing James before he went back to college, going to the Oasis and watching my sister’s band play, playing FF9 with Ron, etc. Fun times.
And yeah, today I designed my site, and went out to dinner with my mom and sister.
There’s your recap. Now say something interesting about my new design.

34 comments

  1. The site of doom.
    It’s a personal thing, but I really hate when you scroll down and there is no definite line where the text dissapears/appears. I think many people enjoy it, but OMFG!!!111uno kill it for me. Or you know, don’t.
    ~Asya

    1. ARGG. It’s intentional. Notice how the rest of the site is jagged as well. I actually made the background image from a vector logo I created myself, so be sure that there’s no way a vector image would be unintentionally jagged…

    1. One way or another = ME.
      Andy, he didn’t find his way there through you. You were a delivery boy. I was on the phone with him for like 5 hours on and off directing him to SR. Fuckin’ hell.

  2. The New Layout Looks Nice!
    Version 7 of the layout looks great =)
    Here are my comments and suggestions:
    Good idea with using <DIV>s here (kinda like what I’m doing with my site, except it’s moving away from <TABLE>s, rather than <IFRAME>s…) – If it’s not meant for tabular content, then don’t use a table =P
    Running your site through the W3C’s CSS Validator turns up four problems (three errors and a warning – fortunately, three of them seem to have no effect on the appearance of the page, although it’d still be a good idea, in my opinion, to fix them):
    For BODY, the property bgcolor should be replaced with background-color (I’d also suggest adding a # sign before the hex color value it uses, as it will probably bring up another error if it’s left out for now). This will make sure the background shows up gray, rather than white.
    For .border, there needs to be a # sign before the hex color value.
    For the <DIV> tag, the value needs to have a unit after it (just add “px” right beside it, with no space between the two). However, I’d suggest not doing this, as the last item in this list has a better fix that also takes care of this problem.
    For the font-family tags in both BODY and .border, a generic font family should be added to the end of the set, after Verdana (probably a sans-serif font, since Verdana is also one of them) – Just change it from font-family: verdana; to font-family: verdana, sans-serif;, and that will be taken care of.
    This one isn’t a problem, but I’d suggest putting the background image address inside the parentheses in quotes (as it seems to be proper procedure there for that property).
    The table width is causing problems in non-IE browsers…But on further inspection, you might want to check out your code for the tables – I think some of the </td>s and </tr>s got switched around, and this might be what’s causing them to act up.
    The coding for the <DIV> tag can be cleaned up a bit – I’d suggest giving your layout <DIV> a particular ID, and move the style coding it has to your CSS coding:
    (In this example, the ID for the <DIV> will be called “layout”, though you can call it whatever you want.)
    Change this:
    <div style="overflow:auto; width:100%; height:447; z-index:1">
    To this:
    <div id="layout">
    And add this to your CSS code:
    #layout {overflow: auto; width: 100%; height:447px; z-index: 1;}
    I hope these suggestions will be of use to you =D
    Wolfey

    1. Re: The New Layout Looks Nice!
      Whoa, hey Ragnarok! 😛
      Thanks a lot. I’ve fixed some width problems by making the page uniformly 800. And the div I basically cut and pasted from a previous design, and since I’m only using it once, I don’t really have to make an id for it, but I have done so for other tables, etc.
      Good to hear from you again, and thanks for the quite intricate code examination.

  3. It looks okay but there are some problems under the hood. Some of this is because LiveJournal uses different code than you (so there is a mix of HTML 4.0 and XHTML 1.0 syntaxes for things like break tags), but there are some other fixable things that would make the site much better, like adding a doctype declaration, using CSS and XHTML instead of those gosh darn nested non-semantic tables, and fixing validation issues. Mixing divs and nested tables for design is kind of weird too. Why not just go all the way and embrace standards compliance?
    My only creative criticism is that having a big copy of the LiveJournal logo as the background is kind of wack.

    1. Yeah, I guess a doctype tag wouldn’t hurt… but I’m a little behind in my knowledge of XHTML, and the only reason I’m using a DIV is because it’s supposed to create a scrollable text box. If I can do that with tables, then I will. It’d be great if you could point out just a few more specific things I could do, since I don’t know too much about CSS and XHTML.
      And yeah, the LiveJournal logo is kinda silly, but that’s because my site never revolved around LiveJournal, and now it’s the main attraction. I might change that some time in the future, but as of now, I’ll just let it sink in.

      1. XHTML is hella hella easy. Fix yourself up with a solid doctype, close all your tags, and for tags that don’t close like linebreaks, you add a space and a trailing slash, like so:
        CSS is pretty easy too. You add class or id attributes to tags you want to style, and then add style rules in a linked CSS file. with accompanying CSS rule “.blahimage { border: 3px solid #0f0 }” gives the image a bright green border. Granted it can get kind of complicated when there’s lots of stuff going on, but anything you can do with tables you can do with CSS faster and cleaner and more compatibly.
        More good info at http://www.alistapart.com/

        1. Awww fucking wack, LJ fuh tuh and misinterpreted my & lt ; and & gt ;.
          Here is how that should have actually looked:
          <img src=”blah.jpg” class=”blahimage” />

    1. Re: no starbase=
      Uh, what? Since this was completely anonymous I think I have the right to bash you since the comment was totally out of place and completely out of the blue. Whoever wrote this, are you all right in the head? 😛

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