shibbyonline

Dark, almost black

It is a little bit later than planed but here is the new theme/style for shibbyonline.
Code named Black it is the first theme I have created using a dark background, those of you who have followed my themes and designed will know that it is mainly light colours that float my boat.

There are still little bugs to work out and I’m in the process of writing new archive and about pages but hopefully once completed it might make it’s way to a release.

New home and a new start

This should hopefully be a ‘come back’ style of post, as you will know I have been some what pre-occupied with other things and the whole blogging side of my life was put on hold.

Yet what better to kick start your progress than a new theme!
I present to you: Frost.

It is still not 100% complete but over the next few days it should be tweaked to a point of being workable.
The second more important news is that shibbyonline has moved.
For many years the good people at UK Cheapest have been providing me a place to call home. Yet with another year looming I thought I would shop around. I ended up at 5thirtyOne and noticed the offer currently running with his host of choice; DreamHosts. Being the cheap bastard that I am I signed up and got a cheap year; thank you Derek!

All in all despite the lack of work on the surface things have been moving very quickly behind closed doors. Now that everything is sorted it just leaves me time to sort out my email clients and the new DreamHost settings.

Search box, Light Box and other Scripty goodness

I’ve been working away at those extra little bits on the site, you know all that fluff that makes you feel good about the amount of time you spend sitting in front of a computer screen.

The latest installments apart from some style changes are the use of the various script.aculo.us Java scripts. First off we have the new AJAX powered search bar found on the home page, in the archives and on any 404. The second is the use of Lightbox for displaying photograph’s and images from within posts.
I have always enjoyed using the script.aculo.us libraries for various effects but since moving themes around I sort of missed the boat when it came to the whole Lightbox revolution that appears to have taken the web by storm.

My problem was that I did want to find a way to display images in a way that kept a small clean image in the post but would allow the reader to see a larger version without directing them to an external source such as my Flickr account. I’m afraid that at present Lightbox is the perfect answer, of course I could have followed Derek’s comments and tried Thickbox which runs off the more streamlined compressed jquery script. But when I’m already loading part of the script.aculo.us for the search bar it makes no sense to load another library to save space. Besides which due to my limited readership, bandwidth or page load is not a concern, I’m not exactly digg material!

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Sorry to 50.9%

According to Mint 50.9% of the visitors to my site use Internet Explorer (shame on you, browse happy!) needless to say you must cater for all users really and 50% is something you just can not ignore.
Chris brought to my attention that the site is not IE friendly, everything still displays and you get the whole picture, just not the picture I intended you to see.
If you using IE your screen looks something like the picture, the navigation side bar should not be sitting down there, it should be flush with the top of the article.
If you are using a standards approved browser have a look at the picture and see the fun you are missing.

I will get round to fixing this, I’ve just not had the time to cross check this site in other browsers.