Elliot Swan

3 Things Worth Talking About in Regards to the Live Redesign 3:24 pm

After almost 2 years I believe it’s been, I finally got around to putting up a new design. While it’s still a major work in progress, I felt it was good enough to share. And while it may not seem like a ton’s going on yet, there’s a few things I’d like to touch on and share with you all–at least one of which I’m quite excited about.

1) Wider, more practical layout

I’m going with a 960px-wide layout for the first time on elliotswan.com, and I got rid of a lot of useless stuff that was crowding up the homepage in order to let content be the focus.

It also lets me have a wider sidebar to keep secondary info, and I’ll be selling 125×125px ads there now (if you’re interested in advertising, feel free to shoot me an email at elliot [at] elliotswan.com).

CSS is now built over blueprint.css

This is my first time actually using any sort of CSS framework, and I’ll admit, blueprint.css is pretty nice. While I’m not using everything it offers (such as form styles), it’s quite useful for setting up grids and basic typography styles.

Originally I had it set up to keep a fixed baseline throughout the design, but I soon realized that because of the nature of a dynamic blog it’s quite difficult to keep working. I may work on some scripts to keep the baseline grids no matter what images are posted, but that’s not a current priority.

What I really wanted to talk about–TweetRemote

Since I’ve been twittering a lot, I felt that it’s taken away from what I used to use this blog for (especially as comes to the asides, or snippets posts). However, I hate when blogs pull their Twitter posts onto their blog and overrun it with useless, 140 character posts that are often just replies or random thoughts. If I wanted to read your tweets, I’d be following you on Twitter (and for many of you, I already am). I don’t want to go to your blog and read the same thing.

Yet at the same time, many times I’ll post things to Twitter that would also work on the blog. For example, cool links, questions, or images. But I really don’t want to have to post it to Twitter and still go open a new post on WordPress. That’s where TweetRemote comes in.

Using hashtags, I can tag some of my tweets depending on the type of content it is. If it’s some text, I’d tag it #text. If it’s a link, I’ll tag it #link. Or if it’s an image, #image. I then set up a little something that pulls tweets and posts them to different WordPress categories depending on these tags. This lets me style each type differently, and if there is no tag, it’s not posted–keeping this blog free from @replies or other randomness not fit for it.

Currently it supports #text, #link, and #image–Soon I’ll probably also be adding support for quotes. And yes, this will be released to the public once it’s been cleaned up a bit.

So there you go, a little bit about what’s happening here. Make sure to keep a watch out for more crazy-awesomeness.