Haven’t done much blogging in the last few days, but it’s with good reason: I’ve been working. 🙂 It’s fun work, though, and it’s substantially different from the things I do at the day job so it’s a chance to exercise some different brain musculature.
I’ve had two main projects on the go, both similar but each with its own challenges. The one that came up most recently—last night, in fact—is translating a graphic designer’s multi-page PDF mockup of a new website into HTML/CSS. I surprised myself on that one by getting it up and running from scratch within an hour… I’ve no idea how Internet Explorer will mess it up, mind you, but it’s fundamentally done for other A-class browsers. The CSS is a bit of a regression from other sites I’ve worked on, as it’s written for a fixed size instead of being more fluid, but it’s what the design called for.
The other project is True Blue, a redesign of one of the areas on this very site. I’ve had it on my plate for a few years, and have made stabs at it from time to time, but it’s languished, mostly due to not having a good sense of what I wanted to accomplish with it. In the last couple of weeks, however, I’ve started to see some progress. The first breakthrough was finding a legible, attractive, appropriate font; second was tweaking the shade of blue, which is important for a theme that’s named after the colour! With those taken care of, things seem to be falling together a little more smoothly, although I’ve still got a long way to go before I unleash it on the world. For various reasons I want to have it presentable by February 20, which is what’s known at work as a stretch goal. We’ll see.
