Frequent readers of my blog will have noticed by now that something’s different. I’ve had my old blog design for about a year and a half, and for the last six months, the look of it was really bothering me.
In short, my old blog looked like a cheap suit - very grey with too many noisy bits (pinstripe background seals the “suit” analogy).
I decided to reduce all the clutter by choosing a minimalistic layout, and the base theme is one by Codreanu Catalin. The colors come from the SNES controller (and the Earthbound menu).
Hopefully now the content takes precendence without obtrusive layout getting in the way.
Easy to click links using padding
If you have ever been frustrated with impossible to click links on site navigation menus, email this 37signals blog post to the sitemaster.
Basically the technique of padding links has been around for a long time, but has been largely ignored when implementing the HTML. Many designs encorporate large areas around links, yet there’s a grey-area as to whether these areas should be clickable as well. I think that anything which makes it easy for the user should be done, and done well.
Padding link targets for better mousing [37signals]
Quick JavaScript CSS Theme Switching
In the DOM Level 2 specifications, the disabled property is defined for <LINK> and <STYLE> elements. Toggling this property using JavaScript allows for quick CSS style switching. It’s great for switching between themes!
To illustrate, I’ve written a simple JavaScript CSS theme toggling function. It supports both external CSS stylesheet references and local STYLE declarations.
Click here to see the demo (view the source code for more information).
