Self-evidently (unless you're reading this via a feed), I've redesigned Irate Scotsman a bit.
Highlights include:
- Trying to use basic semantic markup (which really amounts to
H1etc tags right now). - Trying to be valid XHTML 1.1 (and valid CSS, of course). Both validate for the main page as of now, at least. Might get around to touching-up old posts which violate the standard.
- We now set META ROBOTS tags to prevent indexing of all pages except permalinks, so Google results leading here should be better.
- The calendar from the sidebar is gone. People found it confusing as a primary means of navigation. Now, we have links at the bottom of the page (after the most recent posts) to move backwards or forwards through the posts in the current category. This seems to be what people expect.
Thanks to <a href="http://solitude.vkps.co.uk/">Gary</a> for bugging me to do
this, and to Jonathan Corum at <a href="http://www.style.org/">style.org</a>
for the CSS file on which the new CSS is based. I've actually got two bonus questions for all
you CSS gurus:
- One problem is that on pages which are shorter than the browser window, the footer bar
rides up, sometimes underlapping the category list on the right. Can I make it somehow
always hug the bottom of the window if the page is shorter than the window, but just
fall to the end of the page if the page is taller than the window? I don’t want to just
make it always ride on the bottom edge of the window with
position: fixed;etc. - I’m damned if I can get the category-list on the right to be horizontally centered within
the sidebar div. I’ve applied
text-align: center;to both the sidebar div and to the inner div which contains the category list. Any suggestions?
And that's about it. Any feedback or bug-reports are most welcome, via the Comments link below.
Update: I’ve worked around the footer bar problem by simply removing the
background colour and border from the footer. I also tried setting the background colour
of the sidebar to white, but that looked ugly when it chopped off the footer if the footer
was underlapping.
I also solved the problem of centering the category list table within the sidebar; you simply
define a class for the table itself which sets the left and right margins to
auto,
like this:
table.center { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }table tag itself:
<table class="center">