Redefining and Redesigning
Welcome, gentle reader, to the next iteration of the aetherworld. I’ve gone slack with my personal websites once contract based work started to eat away at my time and side projects fought over the remaining scraps. Well, here I go again. I’ve found out that for me there’s nothing better than drastic changes to get me back in line. This time, however, I’m not only relauncing but also redefining, redesigning and rebooting the aetherworld.
Redefine. Or: how things should be
First registered somewhere around 2000 (if my memory serves me right), the aetherworld has almost never had a consistant purpose. At one point it was a personal link collection, then a place to try out various CSS layouts, a listing for my music collection, a place where I blogged about design and tech stuff and for the past year, it was dead. Literally.
The first logical step for me is redefining, what the aetherworld should become. I decided to turn it into a blog again, forcing me to concentrate more on content than on presentation. I want it to be a place to share my web design and web development work as well as personal thoughts on various topics.
Old aetherworld layouts
Redesign. Or: how things should look
Whenever I have a blank paper in front of me, something inside of me wants to draw, to design, to make the paper become something beautiful, something with a purpose and something pleasant to look at. A blank paper and a pencil is my greatest incentive for starting to work on a project.
The same goes for a blank website. I could have chosen to design the site in private, work on the layout till it’s perfect, and only then make the finished version go live. I chose not to. A blank and unstyled website is as much incentive to get me working as a blank paper. Every time i see the naked aetherworld, I’ll want to style it, make it better, make it look beautiful. That will be my way to give myself a kick in the ass.
Bandwagon
I thought my live design was a unique idea. That’s why I was really shocked when I saw other people doing the same. Well, so there goes novelty.
Anyway, the design process will be completely live and will take place over a longish period of time. I’m planning to be finished before January 1st though. So bear with me as I’m adding content and layout and expect things to break from time to time.
Tags: aetherworld, design, reboot, relaunch
Nice idea, but you have seen this kind of double posting (two times the same post)?
Which plugin do you use for the comment preview? It’s a nice idea.
Oh, and welcome back to the living ;)
Thanks for the heads up. It’s no double posting though, that’s actually the intended behavior. You’ll see when the layout is finished ;) As for the live preview, that’s just a little JavaScript which sets the innerHTML of a preview div to the contents of the comment text box. The plugin for Wordpress is called ‘Live Comment Preview’. It’s no good for me though. I want to use Markdown formatting for comments and that’s not really doable with JavaScript. I’ll enhance the plugin to use AJAX and a PHP script which takes the Markdown formatted text and returns XHTML. Might take me a few days though till it’s implemented.
Maybe you could release this as a plugin, I would like to use this too. And I am waiting to see the intention behind this strange behavior :D
Could you implement a way to change the gif animation (white-background-in-the-animation-on-a-dark-site-problem)? Besides it looks real nice, thumbs up.
Look in the php class file. The first variable is the string defining how the preview looks. You should use your own indicator image. You can also control class/id/placement and whatever…
The bandwagon effect almost stopped me, but who cares what everone else is doing.
Very true. And always when I visit your site I’m glad you’re not far ahead of me with your redesign. Bryan is almost finished. It’s a shame I’m stuck with work. I guess I can try to finish the layout after christmas… By the way, thanks for the post about Tiger Admin on your site, just installed the new version and it’s great! Nice tip!
check your menu in opera..
I’ll look into the Opera menu bug, though. Thanks again.