The site has chan­ged and I would like to dub these edits and impro­ve­ments an upgrade. The old black and orange layout, shown below, was my first attempt at crea­ting a site com­ple­tely from CSS, more than a year ago now. This tur­ned out a fai­lure, after hours of mes­sing and con­ti­nual frus­tra­tion with the disc­re­pan­cies bet­ween Inter­net explo­rer and Fire­fox and the bas­tar­di­za­tion of CSS ren­de­ring, in des­pe­ra­tion I resor­ted to methods I knew best — tables and those drea­ded font tags. This resul­ted in for­mat­ting that was half con­tro­lled by a hac­ked IE-fixing style sheet and half by ran­dom style and for­mat­ting strings pla­ced spo­ra­di­cally throughout the design. To say the code was messy was an unders­ta­te­ment. Another pro­blem became the acces­si­bi­lity of con­tent — all the links to older posts, archi­ves, spe­cial pages, my web­si­tes and other ran­dom artic­les became obs­cu­red, hard to find and ulti­ma­tely hid­den from the rea­der. Thirdly the site, although loo­king rela­ti­vely sty­lish on a flat screen was almost ille­gi­ble on a clas­sic CRT. For these rea­sons, and pro­bably a few others I deci­ded to address my dis­taste with this blog and fix everything that was once wrong.

My aims were thus to create a clean crisp appea­rance that looks good on all screens, where links are in visi­ble and logi­cal posi­tions and the sepa­ra­tion of posts, con­tent, ads and infor­ma­tion is obvious. This was to be brought about using a pure CSS design, no tables — a site that’s con­tent can be com­ple­tely sepa­ra­ted from its appea­rance. I am pretty plea­sed with the results, my aims have been ful­fi­lled and the style sheet did not have to revert to a sin­gle IE fix. The big­gest pro­blems I had to over­come were firstly the cen­tral posi­tio­ning of the main table and the right column.

My first attempt at crea­ting the centre-piece was to use an auto-margin on either side of the <div> using margin-left and margin-right, yet Inter­net explo­rer doesn’t like this in the sligh­test. I remem­ber having a num­ber of sim­ple mar­gin issues with IE during pre­vious esca­pa­des. I switched to the ‘all-in-one’ defi­ni­tion and defi­ned only the left mar­gin as auto: “margin:0px auto;” and then set the table width to a fixed amount before appl­ying the ‘work-around’ which is to pro­vide the body ele­ment with a “text-align:center”, this posi­tions the <div> in the cen­tre of the page from the start. A second text-align is then requi­red within the <div> so that all the text within it is not also centered.

Fixing the column issue has a less ele­gant solu­tion. In fact the first method was the best, it uti­li­sed the float para­me­ter and allo­wed text to flow around the column once it had ended, the height of the main <div> would adapt to inc­lude all the con­tent. Howe­ver appl­ying my design to blog­ger pre­ven­ted this, on each post Blog­ger adds an irre­mo­va­ble <div> with the style “clear:both” which ren­ders all floa­ting around said ele­ment impos­si­ble. I ima­gine this is a secu­rity mea­sure to pre­vent users hiding mali­cious things, etc. Going back to the drawing-board yiel­ded an abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned column with mar­gin to get the correct align­ment and a res­tric­tion on the post <div> to pre­vent over­lap. A new pro­blem pre­sen­ted, by pla­cing the con­tent abso­lu­tely the main con­tai­ner would not stretch to encom­pass the full con­tent, a crude fix for this was to inc­lude a minimum-height tag within it. If anyone has some bet­ter sug­ges­tions on sol­ving this dilemma I am all ears.

After 18 months or so this place had a solid layer of unplea­sant dust cove­ring everything, and not that cool kind of musky dust, the horri­ble flaky skin stuff. It was about time for a good dust off and rea­rran­ge­ment. Thus I have refi­ned the site and clea­ned up many of its buggy aspects inc­lu­ding those old ugly loo­king com­ments. Sim­ple CSS and HTML tweaks have yiel­ded a few dra­ma­tic impro­ve­ments here and there and for good mea­sure I have intro­du­ced a num­ber of new fea­tu­res to my blog. Image and video posts tend to clog up the main opi­nions blog I have here on the front page so they have been pro­mo­ted to their own blog cate­go­ries; [Ima­ges] [Video] much like the music sec­tion used to be. These will basi­cally be areas for me to post up ran­dom ima­ges I find, cool videos I have seen and other pecu­liar tid­bits. In addi­tion I have added a desk­tops page which shows and logs my desk­top setups over the years, pro­vi­ded links to my per­so­nal “Mega Search” pages that just search a lot of sites at once for my con­ve­nience. Links have been upda­ted and now there’s a small little search fea­ture should you find your­self lost.

These things always take lon­ger than you expect, now I will go back to rea­ding my book in the sunshine!

http://​www​.indie​cult​.com

There are hun­dreds of review sites and for every niche musi­cal genre there is a hated music review site to accom­pany it. It is our aim to create a loca­tion dedi­ca­ted to great ‘inde­pen­dent cul­ture’ without the accom­pan­ying sub­jec­ti­vity of reviews and ratings. There will be no ‘reviews’ as such on this site, nor will there be ratings — pla­cing a piece of ori­gi­nal art on a nume­ri­cal scale along­side everything else is insul­ting and enti­rely opi­nio­na­ted. To remove the sub­jec­ti­vity of a medium weigh­ted so enti­rely by opi­nions will be dif­fi­cult but we can try. For this rea­son all artic­les are open to public opi­nion, an article that is an assort­ment of mul­ti­ple views will pro­vide you with a roun­ded and infor­ma­tive resource.

Today sees the offi­cial ope­ning of Inde­pen­dent Cul­ture, already we have a dedi­ca­ted team of wri­ters and edi­tors and there are a huge num­ber of fea­tu­res we still wish to imple­ment on the site. We hope you enjoy your stay.

“Swee­ping gene­ra­li­za­tions from a posi­tion of par­tial ignorance.”

I have relea­sed a fan­tas­tic new web­site for your delec­ta­tions, a site dedi­ca­ted to the live action adap­ta­tion of the Halo franchise.

halo​mo​vie​.tri​vial​being​.net

Say hello to the latest mem­ber of the tri­vial being network.

Inside BBC: http://​bbc​.tri​vial​being​.net

The aim of this site is to docu­ment and inform you of the latest inno­va­tions, chan­ges, artic­les and impro­ve­ments made at the bri­tish broad­cas­ting company’s (BBC) web­site and elsewhere. Such as their inte­rac­tive media pla­yer and open source plans.