www.vegard.net

Redesign: Progress.

Posted 21:46 CET Monday February 15th, 2010 (204 days ago). 254 views. No comments. Tagged with Redesign, Site News.

Yeah, how’s it going with that redesign I’ve kept rambling on about lately? I’m happy to announce that there is in fact some progress, and here’s a little teaser for you.

You’ll notice there is no trace of the color palettes I spent a week looking for and you won’t find the fonts I dug up from the darkest hole on the interweb. In fact, the only thing I planned to use that you’ll also see above are the rounded corners. Why is that? Well, several times I sat down to start to work from scratch on the new design and every single time I ended up ripping my hair out while I was banging my head against the keyboard, cursing CSS and all the things I couldn’t make it do.

It’s time to face the facts. I once knew how to create magic style sheets, but I never did manage to keep up with all the new things that have happened since the last time I designed something from scratch. In the end I sat down to look at free WordPress themes, and I eventually selected two themes from Theme Lab that I will merge and modify to my liking.

I wrote the first entry about the redesign all the way back in December last year, so you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for anything to happen. Still, the progress has been quite good tonight, I’ve finished the general layout, the navigation, the header and implemented the one-liners.

I should probably also mention that the new server is working a lot better than the old one, both in terms of stability and performance. Good, although nerdy, times.

Bright Blue Light.

Posted 22:35 CET Thursday January 21st, 2010 (229 days ago). 478 views. No comments. Tagged with Personal, Site News.

The new server is now up and running, serving both this site and my e-mail accounts. There were of course a few minor hiccups when it went live, but they should all be sorted out now. Time will show if the new server is more stable than the old one, but one thing is for sure: It’s a lot faster, with an insignificant load average compared to the old server. Now all I have to do is to sit back and wait for the one-liners to get picked up by another high volume site and see if the server is able to handle the peak traffic.

There are two minor annoyances I’ll have to solve, though. First of all, the CPU fan is too noisy. I kind of already knew this before I turned it on, and I’ve ordered a new one that should be more silent. If it’s not, I’ll still need a backup fan. Then there are the two LED lights in the chassis’ front panel. They are literately illuminating my living room. Why do case manufacturers install LED lights that could easily double as head lights for a MAC truck? I don’t know. Disconnecting them is not an option, because I want some visual indication that the hard drives are working every now and then. It can probably be solved with some semi-transparent tape, though, so it’s not a biggie.

And now for something completely different. Continue reading "Bright Blue Light." →

Redesign: Bits & Pieces.

Posted 11:07 CET Saturday January 16th, 2010 (234 days ago). 249 views. No comments. Tagged with Redesign, Site News.

So you thought I’d forgotten all about my redesign project, did you? I have to admit I’ve spent more time working on the new server than the redesign lately, but sometimes you just have prioritize differently than you initially planned. Sounds familiar? Well, that’s probably because it happens to all of us all the time.

I’ve been surfing the internet for inspiration, selecting design elements I like that I’d try to implement in my own design. These are some of the bits and pieces I’ve found so far:

• I’d like to have both a header and a footer that span the entire width of the screen, no matter how wide it is, but still keep the width of the actual content fixed. Also, the footer color should be high contrast compared to the page background color. I might even put more content in the footer than I have today. Trent Walton’s site is a good example of the kind of footer I’m talking about.
• I’m semi-active on Twitter and will soon hit 300 tweets. Not that much, but a lot more than the average Twitter user. Personally, I think it’s a good way to just get something out there without having to write an entire blog entry. I’m seeing people visually identify the tweets on their site by using an icon or image resembling the Twitter bird. I’d like to do something similar, and it looks like there are no shortage of free images to choose from.
• A feature I’d like to reintroduce in the design is the entry calendar. It was great for displaying what days I’d written something and it will also generate a bit more traffic by people who get lost while browsing around on the site. I don’t think I will set off writing my own calendar, there are most likely other WordPress users who have had the same need and made excellent plugins already.
• I’ll try to cure my shyness by adding a picture of myself in the About section. You might have some privacy concerns, but I’m already sharing more than enough information to feed the stalkers on a weekly basis anyway. Besides, bonding with the user can result in he or she becoming a regular visitor.
• I’d like to add some kind of indication in the navigation that shows the user where he or she is currently on the site. Robert Alan’s site is a good example of what I’m thinking about. An even nicer navigation can be found on Brian Hoff’s site. He also has a large footer section that pretty much sums up my footer thoughts.
• Gradients are a popular effect to use on the site background. My PhotoShop/Gimp experience is so limited I don’t even known how to make a gradient background, but I’m sure there are some tutorials floating around out there.

All in all, these are a lot of design elements that are nice by themselves. The great challenge now will be to get everything to work together and to start the actual implementation. As you can tell, many of the design elements I’ve found have square corners and thus breaks away quite clearly from the rounded-edges-design I’ve been going on and on about. But, once again, plans are made to be changed.

Downtime.

Posted 17:26 CET Monday January 4th, 2010 (246 days ago). 237 views. No comments. Tagged with Site News.

It seems I don’t need the help of others to take my site offline. When I got to work today, I discovered that I was unable to read my private e-mail. Yes, I read private e-mail at work. Nor was I able to access this site, or the server it’s hosted on via SSH. I was able to ping the ISP gateway in my living room, so the network connection was OK.

So, after work, I got home, restarted the box and everything was online again in a matter of seconds; the Ubuntu Server startup time is very, very low. Unfortunately, I was not able to find anything about the incident in the logs, the last thing that happened was that the Amazon S3 backup started. That might of course be the problem, but it has been running for a while without any problems.

My best guess is that the VIA CPU on the motherboard and the Linux kernel isn’t the best of friends. I’ve had problems with the same CPU model before when using Debian, so I’m guessing that’s the most likely cause. A few weeks ago I ordered a new Mini-ITX motherboard with an embedded Intel Atom based CPU, and that CPU should be 100% compatible with the kernel and it’ll arrive in about two weeks time.

Until then, if the site is offline, there’s no need to panic! It’ll surface again shortly. Also, if you sent me any e-mail from 07:00 to 17:15 CET today, it’s probably a good idea to send it again. Your SMTP server should retry for at least 48 hours if the recipient server is unavailable, but you never know.

Now I’m getting some dinner and then it’s off to the gym, meaning I have to take the bus back to work to go to the gym there. Being a web host provider sure is hard work!

Redesign: Layout and Eye Candy.

Posted 10:57 CET Friday January 1st, 2010 (249 days ago). 330 views. No comments. Tagged with Redesign, Site News.

Now that I have settled with colors and fonts, one last thing is left before I can start with the implementation of the design: How should the site look in terms of layout and various eye candy? Rounded corners come to mind. I got to have rounded corners, right?

The best place to find inspiration is on the internet, because there are a lot of very nice site designs out there. Another source of inspiration might even be my own previous designs. While looking for some old pictures today, I stumbled across this one:

It’s taken at work in May 2007. Why I took the picture, I don’t know, I’m guessing it wasn’t long after another redesign of the site. Please don’t mind the mess on the desk, the incoherent ramblings on the post-it notes and the fact that I have Steam installed on my work computer. Have a look at the design. The first thing that hit me was “that’s a nice design, I like it. It’s clean and pleasant to look at”. However, since I made it myself, it’s probably not too surprising that I like it. One of the elements I really miss in the current design is the calendar widget on the sidebar. The one on the picture was one I made myself for my own, homegrown CMS, but I’m sure someone has made a similar, and most likely better, widget for WordPress. Continue reading "Redesign: Layout and Eye Candy." →