Tag: Site dev

As you might have noticed the site is currently looking odd in some places. After a month with tumblr and related learnings i’ve got some ideas for improving my site. And since i just had some stupid trouble with setting up a good and solid local installation i decided to do the work live. For your entertainment

After noticing that the archives are now heavily frequented i thought it might be a good idea to get rid of Cufon rendering the headlines in order to make it more STRG-F search friendly. Since i hate Arial i thought i’d give Typekit a try and check out some of those lovely fonts on the web (if you’re reading around here at the moment and wonder what’s happening to the typography, there’s your answer).

While Typekit itself is so easy to implement (just copy two lines of script to your header) and styling via CSS is a dream (having access to a font family of 7 weights rules) it’s not so easy to maintain a good quality in terms of font rendering. Rule of thumb: the bigger the type, the uglier it gets.

And i just measured that loading the script and fonts via Typekits API significantly slowed down the entire site. Such a pity. I really hope that they get rid of those rendering and performance problems asap. PLEASE!!!!

PS: The font used on the screenshot was lovely Museo Sans by Jos Buivenga/Exlibris

…that took way too long to get this on the road again. But for good, i hope. Of course i’m not done (again) but the major improvement in terms of navigating around this site are worth going online enough.

What changed?

• The layout is based on a 9 columns grid, 1017px wide. Why? Cause i’m very bored with the standard look everywhere and different layouts are much easier to realize with a grid. Expect some nice (or at least better) looking articles and posts soon.
• Everything is focussed on reading. Goodbye stupid sidebar. Goodbye prominent links.
• The navigation is much more transparent now, i’ll add some jQuery stuff shortly.
• Archives are now properly employed and a very handy thing to use.
• The search is back as well (yeah, hurt me plenty for not offering one in the last layout!)
• Parts of the category structure have been revised to make more sense
• The dj mixes and music releases are majorly improved. I added many mixes and some releases, you can now listen to sets and tracks on the topmost level. More coming soon…

Let me hear what you think, if you’re missing something, find some ugly bugs or whatever!

PS: I just noticed that something is borked in my custom fields which manages the audio player. So you actually don’t have too much to listen to as promised in the category overview. But i’ll fix that shortly!

Do i need a Like button here?