New Site Look

If you read this in a feed reader, you might want to go to my actual site to see what I'm talking about :-)

Usually, when I rewrite the underlying code behind jtauber.com, I do a redesign of the look as well. In the 14 years that jtauber.com has been around, it's probably had around 10 different looks. The last change took place when I wrote Leonardo in 2003.

When I ported Leonardo to Django I really should have changed the look, in keeping with tradition, but I didn't. I decided this weekend to do some code clean up and add a couple of new features and ended up doing a completely new look as well. I also switched from Django 0.96.1 to Django trunk (including qs-rf), although I don't make use of any of the new features yet.

Here's a brief list of what I did change:

• changed colour from the green I've had for the last five years to a purple more like what I had in 2002 but with lickable gradient site title
• went from a two-column to three-column layout so I'd have a place to put some Web 2.0 goodies on every page
• added my photo to the home page :-)
• added Twitter updates
• added links to my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles
• added an overflow property to pre so code examples don't overlap the right column
• fixed an annoying bug where if you got the maths question wrong your comment would get forgotten
• made add comment form initially hidden and available only via a toggle
• inspired by this video at 37 Signals, I added some auto-scrolling to the add comment form—when there is an error in submission, the page automatically scrolls to the errors; and when you toggle the comment form open, it automatically scrolls so the form is fully in view.

Had to trigger hasLayout in IE6 to get it to work there. Fortunately, I'd had that issue previously with Quisition so knew what to do. Thank goodness for VMware Fusion to enable me to check the site on IE6.

I quite like the new look, especially in comparison to the old look. I'm more than a little chuffed at getting the autoscrolling working too :-)