euicho.com

New Layout, New UrbEx Photos

// June 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal/Blog News, Photograpy

Whatcha think?

Barring minor tweaks, My new layout is now done! Most all of it is a 3rd party theme, a first for me! But I chose to use it because I both learned a lot from modifying it, and because programmers always say don’t reinvent the wheel! I chose instead to modify a lot of the spacing and positioning, and add some little touches here and there.

I like how much information it shows, hopefully it doesn’t look too cluttered. As Tufte says, information is the whole point so your design should focus on it and provide a high density without making it unusable. This isn’t exactly ultra dense, but does give you a quick glance at what I’m up to online, as well as focus mainly on the posts–the whole reason for this blog.

I still want to add a couple of navigation links because right now it’s hard to go from post to post (done!), but other than that I’m really happy with how it looks and behaves. Please let me know what you think of it, and offer any suggestions/constructive criticisms. This site is for my readers so I want it to be as easy for you to use as possible!

I’ve also been uploading my backlog of UrbEx photos. I’ve recently added the rest of the POL Tanks, Coal Elevator, Building 943, and the Civil Defense Bunker.

My Accessibility: let me show it to you.

// July 29th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Books, Movies, Music, and TV, Software and Web Design

I really have to say that after only a few pages into Mark Pilgrim’s book Dive Into Accessibility, I find myself both laughing and feeling strongly for the fictitious characters he’s created to illustrate the need for, and problems presented by, accessability. Anybody that runs a website or blog should check it out. At the very least commit yourself to a couple of pages. Its a valuable use of your time.

By the way, euicho.com is currently not section 508 compliant, but it will be very shortly. Its something I’ve been meaning to take care of. In the meantime, at least it does render very nicely in lynx.

The Desktop – My New Layout

// June 9th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Personal/Blog News, Software and Web Design

Well, I figured it was about time for a change. I’ve had the forest theme on here since I moved to the euicho.com domain, and frankly my website felt a little stale.

Although I haven’t blogged about them much, some of you may know I have a somewhat-secret love affair with moleskines that has lasted for a few years now. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of undoing that elastic band, opening up to a fresh page, and writing down anything that comes to mind. One day when I was sketching website layouts in in my large moleskine I stepped back and realized that I needed to change my P.O.V. The layout I wanted was sitting right in front of me! With that in mind I began making a list of the things I wanted on my desk and although I havn’t incorporated all of them (I wanted it to look realistic, but not too cluttered) I’m so far very happy with the initial results. If anyone has suggestions I would love to hear them.

This page is meant to have a non-fixed width, meaning you can shrink it down pretty far and still read entries, however you may hide the random goodies like the magazine (which is really meant to be a website title banner with a dash of fun and humor) and latest photo.

The challenge, however, was choosing the height. I assume nobody is using a height of smaller than 800px in this day and age so that was my minimum requirement and that is why you may be thinking that moleskine is awfully short. My laptop is 1280×800 so that’s not an unreasonable size, however on non-widescreen monitors it does look a little smooshed. I’ll likely make a toggle button to switch from widescreen to 4:3 sizes in the coming weeks. If you are using a smaller resolution than that, lets face it: you need to come join the modern age. If you’re on an iPhone your browser will scale the page, and if you’re on another moble device that doesn’t, use the rss feed.

I hope you all enjoy it, and as I said, if you see anything broken, or that you think needs to be added or changed, please let me know. All constructive criticism is welcome.

Euicho.com Updates

// March 22nd, 2007 // No Comments » // Personal/Blog News

I’ve implemented a couple of small updates to the site today. I had always assumed Wordpress had a printing style it defaulted to if you tried to print a post, however if it did/does, it was lost when I converted my old theme to the new version. I got an email from a reader who was disappointed that he couldn’t print my tiddlywiki article. I was actually shocked to see how horribly his browser rendered the page for printing. The sidebar was running over the text and it was just illegible.

A quick google search yielded a painless plugin to palliate my printing problem (sorry I couldn’t resist the alliteration). The WordPress Plugin Repository offered up the WP-Print plugin, which is available at lesterchan.net.