I’ve made a few gentle upgrades to the blog - it should look a lot better in Firefox (3.0!) now. Plus I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 - and it’s pretty awesome too. Much more fun to use (of course much of the upgradiness is relegated to the back-end that I see - not the front-end that you see - so you’re just going to have to take my word on this).
I am actually up-to-date for once! We’ll see how long this lasts (likely, not very long - I am lazy when it comes to these things).
So upgrading = picture of cat. I think this is part of the ritual at this point, right? Or they kick you out of the blogosphere? Or something?
Also gentle: Piglet’s eyes. They make me cry, they are so sweet. Look at them! Weep tears of cuteness!
Ok, so here’s my official: “hey look everybody, I re-designed this baby!” post (as if you needed prompting, my lovely, lovely fans).
Like always, I’m asking you out there to beta this for me - it should be perfect on Macs running Safari or Firefox, but if you are on a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, I would especially like to hear from you because I no longer have a PC around to check these things on. If anything looks weird (not like the screenshot up there) please comment!
By the way, there is no particular inspiration for this look other than that I wanted something that was fun and summery.
The many body font should be American Typewriter. According to some website I looked at it’s on ninety-five of computers running Windows or Mac operating systems. If you don’t have American Typewriter, the typeface you’re looking at should be Courier New, which, while obviously not my ideal choice (that would be American Typewriter, duh) I feel is a nice face that is seriously underrated for uses outside of coding. At very least it gives me an approximation of the old timey typewritery feel I’m going for.
In crazy and completely unrelated news, last night I had a dream that we found a drowning Staffordshire Bull Terrier while driving along a country road. It had a collar, but it only had it’s name on it. It’s name was Rock & Roll. Is that not the most awesome name for a little bull dog, ever? Now I want a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Rock & Roll.
Tomorrow I leave for England!
Just because I am, like, the best girlfriend ever, I just re-designed Liam’s website for him. Check it out, it’s extra pretty.
Yeah, you wish I were your girlfriend right now.
Here are my inspirations this time around:
- the colour of a manilla envelope
- vintage office supplies
- Paul Smith’s stripes
- Get Smart
- the Game of Life’s logo
Sooooooo… What do you think? Of the re-design? Like what I’ve done with the place? Go ahead, Click around, check it out, you’ll find a few new things hidden here and there (hint: check out my links page, and my sidebars). Please tell me if anything is ceasing to be functional for you, or if my link colours are too bright, or if my text is not readable enough, or if my sidebar is not where it should be (to the left of the main content, by the way…).
In the meantime, here’s a few of my inspirations for that header image up there:
- Geisha of course
- Mamechiyo’s kimonos (especially on blythe dolls)
- Vintage illustrations of Chinese ladies in cheongsam (sometimes known as “Shanghai girls”)
- Miso Pretty’s take on shanghai girls - really awesome product design (hint#1: if you ever wondered what to give me as a present… hint#2: my birthday is on the eleventh…)
- Mary Blair’s “It’s a Small World” murals in combination with her Cinderella concept designs
- Cupcakes! Yay!
Almost finished with my re-design…
Not quite finished with that header up there (the cupcake’s really just a placeholder for now).
Whenever I get into these site overhauls I get a bit obsessed. Thankfully this time I didn’t stay up all night ultimate fighting code.
As you might be able to tell (if you’re at all familiar with these things) I used K2 which is supposed to be the best template out there for wordpress.
It’s all right. Maybe it’s the code induced exhaustion but I’m not sure I can recommend it yet. We’ll see though. It took a long time to figure out what did what. K2 allows you to override the out of the box CSS style-sheet with your own custom style without altering the original code, but I had to stick: “!important” (a CSS code that makes your code literally more important) in front of everything to get anything I wanted to stick.
There was also a lot of finicky stuff hidden away that had to be hunted down and made right.
I’ve at least got it looking the way I want it now.
I’m upgrading my WordPress today, so things might be a bit wonky ’round these parts.
On the upside, me upgrading WordPress means that a re-design of the old website is just around the corner…
Check it out!
My very first torontoist post!
Feel free to comment over there if you like it, or don’t like it, or just think indie rock pigeons making out is the most adorable thing, ever.
Yet another big weekend hereabouts.
First the kitten got sick, and we had to blow some money on taking her to the vet only to find out she was fine, but probably ate something she shouldn’t have.
Which sounds like her.
Now we call her the money pit.
Then I went to a blythe meet at the Magic Pony. I didn’t take pictures, but everyone else did, so it’s just a matter of waiting it out, and stealing them from Flickr (Hurry up new Blythe buddies!).
Then Travis was going to visit, but he couldn’t get on the bus so he didn’t.
Then something very, very cool happened:
I got hired to write for Torontoist!
Woo-woo! I now, officially join the ranks of the paid bloggers!
I just massively updated my wordpress, which I have been avoiding doing for a while.
The back end (the stuff that you readers don’t see) looks much nicer now, but things might be a bit wonky on your end.
Sorry.
If you’ve got any issues with the ol’ blog’s functionality just give me a shout, and I’ll see what I can do.
On Friday night, I went to Red Square for the first time (St. Catharines very own and only hip bar with a communist theme) despite the fact that I have been avoiding the place for years. Appropriately enough, I then signed up for my first LiveJournal account today.
No, seriously.
Now, don’t freak out, nothing’s going to change.
Some nefarious and questionably fashionable hipster has not overtaken my body.
I am not going over to the dark side.
I am just accommodating all those who are already have.
I’ve noticed that some people gravitate more to LiveJournal because of it’s ease of use, and built in community. Not everybody want’s to spend their lives coding, and actively seeking out readers. I have come to understand and accept that and I want to help the people I know and love to be able to access this joint more easily.
I will simply be syndicating my journal there, so that all those who have become accustom to using… sigh… “LJ” can more easily access whatever I put up here.
Starting with this post.
If everything works properly, that is.