Unintentionally Blank

I’m busy at the moment, what with getting to and from work (admittedly taking up most of my time), playing rugby and keeping up with friends, family and eventually sleep. This is my attempt at an explanation for the poor quality of this blog at the moment.

But, I’m not just going to disappear because I run out of hours in the day to do all the stuff I want to. That’s one reason why I am posting now, you always have to make time to do things for yourself. I also fixed my stereo earlier, which was of great importance having bought a number of CDs recently and being unable to play them, but that is beside the point.

Continue reading “Theme Tweaking Hints” »

Good news, my contact page is now fixed. I tried to write my own contact form but had trouble with the theme based construction of wordpress, so I went looking for another plugin. I have settled with Dagon Design’s Secure Form Mailer Plugin, but without using it’s CAPTCHA function. It was easy to install and set working, it is highly customisable and available in a non-plugin form too. If you are looking for a contact form for your blog, I recommend it.

So what are you waiting for? Go send me an email!

Today I spent a little time improving my comment area just for you. At least I tried, here’s what I did:

Gravatars

Pictures are wonderful, so if you have a gravatar and make a comment, your gravatar will now appear thanks to Skippy’s Gravatar Plugun. This had to be the easiest addition to the site today, just a few touches added to the style sheet and voila!

Continue reading “Plugin Day: Gravatars, Subscriptions, Related Posts, Previews?” »

I have been meaning to create a new design for this blog, to accompany the stylesheet switcher, for quite a while and today I finally got round to it. If you select “Tentacles” (the jury is still out on the name), you will see my latest design. It shows what can be accomplished with different stylesheets and the same basic content, plus has given me practice working with transparent pngs, fixed width designs, absolutely and relativley positioned divs and z-indexes. I think it turned out rather well, what do you think?

Also, it has come to my attention that there are problems using both comments and my contact form. Continue reading “A(nother) New Design and Some Site Problems” »

Accessibility is not just about blind users who use screenreading software to hear websites. More than a year and a half ago Joe Clark wrote an article for A List Apart under the name Big, Stark and Chunky. It brought to light a different group of web users that need to be considered when making your site accessible. There are groups of users who aren’t blind, but do have visual impairments, they don’t use screenreaders, instead tend to increase the text size on websites or use magnifiers to view the web. Joe’s article goes on to describe how a site should be designed to accomodate these users and how CSS can help. Light on dark text, single columns, simple navigation and large fonts are the keys to the design we need.

In order to increase awareness of these techniques (and show off my own style sheet switcher) I tore apart my site’s design today in order to come up with a high contrast design that would be more accessible for visually impaired users. Continue reading “High Contrast Design” »