Today’s random thought: I like the way our current blog theme (slightly customised K2) looks, but it is pretty flawed. Everything feels a bit constricted, I’m really not a fan of the whole AJAX Archives system since it loses your position if you navigate away from the page and come back again, and most importantly the thing is tiny. It’s like a tiny little island of content afloat in a massive wide sea of pinku, at least on my monitor (1920×1200). It was built for 800×600 minimum, but does anyone really use below 1024×768 nowadays? The width really frustrates me too, as it means that any images used in posts have to be really small and given that a lot of our content is vector artwork that’s an unfortunate compromise.
I’m also still not 100% sold on Wordpress, though to be honest I doubt that there’s anything better out there. There definitely doesn’t seem to be a decent gallery plugin for it that would be right for what I need (one ‘image’ with links to multiple variations, i.e. resolutions).
Comments and thoughts are appreciated.
EDIT: Embiggenment complete. I can have decent sized images now, yay.
Yeah I guess it does if you browse at full screen, which I don’t. It took me a minute to see what you were talking about.
I don’t browse at full screen so I don’t think it looks bad at all. If you go into the core CSS files, you can adjust the width though and make it more friendly for 1024×768.
You can customize the width of your blog like I did on mine, I’d be happy to share with you how to do so if you are intersted. Hell I’d give you my stylesheet which is very easily modified since it’s already a K2 stylesheet I modded.
I know how to do it, it’s not difficult. I just don’t want to have to make a new header image.
Also my issues with the look go deeper than just the width.
I … am in no position to comment about visual design, but being someone who doesn’t run his browser at full screen I have a tendency to favor single column themes as a result. IMHO the tag cloud widget is the worst and most common graphical design sin people commit with wordpress. In some cases it works, but in far most cases it does not.
I agree, and I’m probably going to get rid of it. It used to look okay, but when I upgraded to 2.5 and K2 RC3 the way it looks changed and I really don’t like it now.
I think what I need to investigate is some kind of fluid style that would resize itself proportional to the page size.
Got rid of the tag cloud.
Just on the point of galleries, Gallery2 is pretty solid (http://gallery.menalto.com/) and you can tell it to provide the image in multiple resolutions.
If you prefer to do the resizing by hand, you can always just create a sub-folder for each image then put the different resolution images in the sub-folder.
Yeah I’m not really wanting a gallery script - those are a dime a dozen - I’m wanting a decent integrated Wordpress plugin. And I want to be able to provide it the multiple resolutions / variations. Ideally integrated with Lightbox or similar too.
Going to probably have to code it all up myself.
From what I can tell it’s possible to integrate Gallery2 and Wordpress (see http://codex.gallery2.org/Integration:WPG2), but it sounds like you want something pretty specific.
Going to write my own gallery plugin I think. It’s been a while since I did any php though.
Disabled the ajax/javascript browsing of older entries since that’s always pissed me off.
Moved the search box down to the bottom because it was looking terrible where it was.
I have freed the site from its 780px shackles. God, this looks so much better with a bit of width to the content area.
I’m not sure if anyone else is having this problem, but your search button is only showing partially below entry field.
I moved the search box down there deliberately, it broke the visual hierarchy of the page when it was at the top. I don’t think it’s ever had a submit button though.
I’m not 100% sure I understand what you mean. Can you throw me a screenshot? Are you perchance using Opera or IE?
I use firefox 3, here’s the screenshot - http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/8372/57609118dz6.jpg
It’s highlighted blue because I clicked it to make it easier to see. Could be the pixel size was changed? So it doesn’t fully display, but that doesn’t make sense if all you did was move it. Like you said though, I don’t remember it having a submit button before.
Interesting. You’re right, it’s definitely there. It looks like the search box is too wide and the submit button is getting knocked off the line, but that doesn’t make sense at all because it’s not in an iframe so there’s nothing that would be sitting on top of it. Unless the navigation box itself is not resizing properly.
I’ll investigate further.
CSS bug. The base CSS file defines the searchform to be a block element 20px high, and the submit button is deliberately knocked down one like so it disappears. Wierd. Wonder why they didn’t just display: none it.
Ideally I should really move it into the header or something.
It would be rather cool if you could move the search bar into a drop down menu in the header…would take some doing however.