Lately I’ve been getting the strongest urge to redesign this site. No doubt due to the frustration of dealing with the four classes I’m taking this fall to finish my psychology degree. I have no ideas for a new layout however so it will definitely have to wait until after the new year. I thought about at least changing the color scheme but I’m going to be strong and refrain and just focus on school. 

Finally, a [slight] redesign. I’ve been wanting to make changes to the front page for a while now but I was having the hardest time getting motivated. Funnily enough, it was the urge to have brown and blue as the color scheme that finally got me interested enough to make a few changes. I also wanted to have the latest photo in the gallery as a main focus of the page. Mostly because I seem to update the gallery a lot more often than any other part of the site! Which isn’t saying much as I think I only average a photo every two weeks.

The latest etnry in the books section goes on the top as well. Eventually, when I get around to adding more content in other sections (which I’m still trying to decide on) that will be rotated through that space as well.

And for historical info .... Thumbnails of the old and new designs.

Edited 1/06:

Even when I think I’m done, I keep tweaking and tweaking and, well, you get the picture. I think I may be finally done. The bulk of the changes have occurred on the home page and though I’m still not quite sure about the actual content that’s going up on the site, at least now more than the site up dates are appearing on the front page. I really do feel like this could be a design that stays up for a while.

No matter my intentions, I just can’t seem to focus on this site. Instead of revamping things like I keep saying I’m going to do, I find myself tweaking and fiddling with other code. Take the photos for example. Till a week ago, they were housed under this domain but the photo pages had a different look. One that I wasn’t too crazy about so I went to all the trouble of integrating all of the photo pages to fit under the LunaNina design only to move them to an entirely different domain a day or two later. Why? I have no earthly idea.

Since the updates to this site are so few and far between I should just go old school and put a splash page up. I might as well. It would save me the trouble or the guilt of seeing that this content never changes much.

A mild spam attack motivated me to clean and tidy up the server a bit. I’m afraid I got a little too comfortable with the delete key however. I’ve noticed from my stats that a lot of searches are landing on the ‘file not found’ page. That’s a problem, but there’s not much to be done about it now.

I’m trying to motivate myself to restructure the site but it’s hard when I’m still not sure what I want to do with this space. A recent article about maximizing the bottom of a web page gave me an idea or two, but finding the time and energy to overhaul the site has proved problematic.

I did, however, find a few minutes to change the stylesheet. I liked the purple look and the header, but I saw a web site yesterday that incorporated some hearts and it hit me then that it’s been a while since I’ve used hearts in any of the designs of this site. I think I may have overdone it with the hearts actually. The header may change in a day or two but it may also grow on me. We’ll see.

The PHP settings on the server are still wreaking havoc on the site. I haven’t quite had the opportunity to fix all of the pages and sections. However, the purchase of a new camera recently has pretty much ensured that the photos section is updated on a regular basis.

The books section also saw a slight redesign last month. I finally got around to setting up a rating system, though the use is still a little spotty. I have always had trouble rating books. It feels slightly wrong and judgemental, and then I remind myself that it’s only a book and that its feelings cannot be hurt. I don’t quite believe this; regardless, the rating system is in place. We’ll see how it works out.

I’ve neglected the site long enough I think. I haven’t left it completely unattended however. The Photo Gallery and the books section have been updated on a pretty regular basis. I’m going to try to get the rest of the site up and running again in the next few weeks months.

I want to bring back the Advocacy section. That’s going to take a little thinking though. The way I was doing it before just wasn’t working.

For the time being, at least the home page no longer has updates from last December.

I constantly make changes to the site, but I never remember to update the news section of the front page. That's an incredible bad habit that I'll try to correct from now on.

In that spirit:

• Due to a generous gift from my brother, I now have a brand new digital camera. This turn of events called for a photo log to be added to the site. Right now the focus is to get used to taking pictures again. It's been a long time since I took pictures for the pleasure of it and I'm quickly discovering that I'm equally uncomfortable behind the camera as I am in front of it, but I'm working on correcting that as well.
• The only other event of note is that I've updated the skins page. The link to that can be found on the About and Mutterings pages.

Footer woes: One of the things I've never liked about this design is that the footer isn't fixed to the bottom of the page. This isn't a problem when the center content is longer than the sides, but as you can (maybe) see from the image, when a page doesn't have a lot of text the footer crawls up the page.

That's been driving me crazy. It's ugly and I don't like it. To fix the problem I put <pre> tags in my code to push the footer down, which is even uglier.

Unfortunately, I don't know enough about CSS and how it renders across browsers to fix the problem, but I do surf the Internet really well. The CSS-Discuss list-serv (I'll give you a moment to laugh about the fact that I'm on a CSS list-serv. Okay. Enough of that.) offered some possibilities, but each tutorial I came across was either way too complicated for me to understand and successfully modify or just didn't meet my needs.

Until now. The Floatutorial from css.maxdesign.com.au seems to have solved my footer problem. The only problem I have with it is that the sides have to load before the center content,

Navigation: Since I was fooling around with the code I figured I'd tackle my navigation links. I've been meaning to redo them in a list format, but have been extremely lazy about it. However, after I read Jason Pearce's Keeping Navigation Current with PHP tutorial on A List Apart I decided it was the perfect time to tackle this little project.

Now, when you venture to the different parts of the site, the page you're on will be highlighted in the navigation bar.

Overall, I think the changes I made aren't hurting things too much. Things look fine in Internet Explorer, Netscape and, as of last night, Safari. If you notice anything buggy, please let me know.

Thanks.

My friend, who very kindly created my moongirl logo, so hated what I did to it this last go around that he took it upon himself to fix it for me. I knew he wasn't all that happy with my grayscale version, but I didn't realize how much he didn't care for it until I received an email with the new and improved colorized version attached.


As soon as I saw it, I loved it, of course. One would have to be a ninny not to see which version is better. I immediately emailed him back and whined begged asked that he please incorporate the new logo into the big heart graphic that I'd created.

He colored the heart red too. He also made logos in black and gray. By using the easy skins with MT and PHP tutorial from Empty Pages I've been able to incorporate the different color logos into different stylesheets. Now people can choose which color scheme they prefer. (Color switcher can be found on the about page.)

For a while now I've been wanting to incorporate my -ahem- little heart obsession into my site design. I just hadn't quite figured out how to go about it without it being too over the top.

Then, during an all day strategic planning meeting at work, I had a thought. I quickly sketched it and tucked it away. This isn't exactly what I drew, but it's as close as I'm going to get since I'm still so graphically challenged. The red is much brighter than I'm used to^* and the text on the left is a little hard to read so I need to give that a little more thought, but all in all, I'm pleased with it.

I don't think the heart is over done. I'll leave that for my comments and entries.



sigh. Stylesheets really make changing the site so effortless. The hardest thing about the whole process is coming up with the design. And I'm using php include files to pull in everything but the actual content so changing my 200+ Web pages from the old stylesheet to the new one only required changing two lines of code. That's very sweet.

Still though, I've no doubt that there are some pages that are looking less than perfect just because that's the way things go. They'll have to stay broken till after my final on Monday, however. I need to spend the weekend studying.


* Changed the red; made it a little darker. The other red had a little too much orange for my taste. Not crazy about orange at all.