I have been playing around with the Amazon Web Services and S3 in particular over the last couple of days. It’s something I have planned to do for a long time now but never have come around till now. But I got a kick in the but to wake up and smell the Amazon Kool-Aid (ok, too many mixed metaphors and pop-cultural references) when I heard Jeff Barr’s presentation “Web Services: Fuelling Innovation and Entrepreneurship” from d.Construct 2006 about AWS, especially how easy it is to get started and play around with the services. One of the tools he mentioned, S3 Firefox Organizer, a Firefox add-on, had me up and running in matter of minutes.
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Yesterday I realized that I really need to get on with the redesign when I had to add an !important to get a CSS-rule to apply. Thanks to Firebug 1.0 beta I got a painful visualization of how inefficient the current code can be, my custom rules on top of the Sanbox “Kubrick” skin.
I will kick off this recurring series with an overview of the basic layout options we have at our disposal. It’s nothing especially earth-shattering, but it’s an important issue to think through properly and just because it seem so basic few do. You might already have heard it a thousand times, that “the web isn’t print”, until your ears fell off. But it’s so true when it comes to layout. In print you can easily sketch up a few layout solution to pick from, based on the page size, proportion and content, and call it a day. The web is something completely different as a medium: the user has complete control over the browser viewport size and font size.
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Over the coming months, I’m going to tear down and redesign this site. I plan to do it slowly, making it a great practice and learning experience for me personally. What I plan to do is chronicle the process, describe steps I’m going to take, what the options are and the rationale behind my choices.
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For a day or two I have been whining about Sandbox on Andy and Scott’s blogs and in my gettext post. Why? Because I recently “jumped on the Sandbox bandwagon”. Making me boast to friends that I’d switched to a theme that made the site look exactly like as before! While they were staring at me in a way I only could interpret as awe.
The theme really reinvigorated my interest in designing for WordPress since it bring a lot of power to the CSS while giving you harsh constrains on the markup (constrains are good, too many choices result in angst, limitations release creativity). And Sandbox do have the promise of becoming the CSS Zen Garden of WordPress.
So I have decided to collect all my Sandbox “issues” and track theme here in this post.
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I think I just found some stylesheet issue with the Kubrick CSS. It is fully possible I introduced the problem myself, but I don’t think so mainly because a) I can’t recall touching any of the affected rules and b) I’ve experienced the same problem on other sites.
What I’m talking about is the font size in Opera 9 on GNU/Linux PPC compared to Opera 9 on GNU/Linux x86 and Firefox on both platforms. The later two cases render the site as the designer intended, while the first render it with xx-small as standard font (or something). It is possible the dpi difference between x86 and my iBook comes into play, and Firefox fixes it somehow while Opera don’t… I don’t know… I’m confused.
Well it isn’t an issue I’m planning to investigate and fix right now. My long term plan is to switch from WordPress and Kubrick to my own design and software anyway. So if the issue pop up its ugly head in the future, then I might be inclined to deal with it.