Something strange…
Posted on November 15th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
will be happening to this website over the next couple of days. There may be times it’s down and other times you might get some gibberish on the screen. Thats because I’m doing a live implementation of my new web design.
Now you should test your sites on your PC before you implement them but that would mean creating a whole new WordPress database on my computer. Unlike many websites this content is dynamically generated by the WordPress blogging engine. You never get to see WordPress as it’s just the back end I use to write posts, manage comments and upload images. All you see are the HTML pages it generates using my PHP templates and my CSS stylesheets.
I’ve had to radically change both PHP templates and all the CSS for my design so over the next couple of days I’ll be putting them through this blog’s WordPress engine (think mangle or mincer) looking at the output and then fixing all the bugs. Luckily you can swap themes quickly in WordPress so once I’ve outputted a web page I can switch back to the old style while I work on fixing the code.
Hopefully they’ll be a fully functioning website by tomorrow morning.
It’s now 22:50, Wednesday 15th. Let’s see how long it takes. Hope you enjoy the new design!
6 comments so far.
Please add a comment
![[Valid RSS]](http://kingofmycastle.com/wp-content/themes/kingofmycastle/graphics/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
KingOfMyCastle on the November 15th, 2006 at 11:32 pm said:
Just testing the comments. It all looks like it’s kind of working.
Only had a three little PHP changes to do and the rest looks like it’s right first time. I make that 40 minutes, not bad.
Still some tinkering to do to the righthand menus, the background is also taking it’s time to appear, this is due to either the Flickr, Amazon or Google banners on the far right. I may see if I can fix that too.
Overall it looks like I might get an early night after all!
KingOfMyCastle on the November 16th, 2006 at 12:44 am said:
Well it’s getting there. I had tried to validate the XHTMl but had no joy so I demoted the code to HTML 4.01 but it still didn’t validate. This was mainly due to the embedded YouTube videos and Google ads. At least the CSS validates! The RSS feed seems to be working too.
The left part of the sidebar is fine now, apart from a few broken links. I have noticed a strange effect in IE on the dotted borders though. I’ll tackle all the plugins on the rightbar tomorrow.
The font size is quite small and if you drop the font-size in IE it’s unreadable. There is a fix for that so I’ll go searching tomorrow.
Anyway, good night!
Rich on the November 16th, 2006 at 5:08 am said:
Looking good JK, like the faint background king and Feed Me got me clicking your sponsors =)
Header font looks good - that one( http://kingofmycastle.com/wp-content/themes/kingofmycastle/graphics/header.jpg )
My only constructive criticisms are - I don’t like the squat king - that one ( http://kingofmycastle.com/wp-content/themes/kingofmycastle/graphics/motif.gif ) - it’s a bit too repetitive for me and maybe the image ratio seems slightly odd to my subconscious.
Speaking of which - where are the knockers? lol
Dave Sharpe on the November 16th, 2006 at 9:59 am said:
New design looks great. Like the font you’ve chosen for the heading. The content background graphic works well too. It adds something to the page without being intrusive.
KingOfMyCastle on the November 16th, 2006 at 11:00 am said:
Thanks for the comments guys, I’m taking it all on board. I still think I have a nother day or two of tinkering to get the best results.
I’m not sure about that motif too Rich but I thought all the white space would drown it out. I may experiment soon. - Oh and WordPress caught your comment for moderation, which is strange, but it wasn’t touched by the spam filter which is good. It should all be instant from now on.
KingOfMyCastle - The Webspace of John King on the November 20th, 2006 at 7:11 pm said:
[…] After last Wednesday’s post on the live implementation I thought there might be nothing left to change on this site. The PHP templates were fixed, the CSS was fixed, the design had improved by a factor of 10, what else was there to do? After adjusting the rightbar adverts, and the comments form I thought I had finished. It was only after I decided to check my site out with some online validation tools I realised there was a lot more to do. The goal was to get one of these: and to do that I needed to get a pass from a range of different sources. I did well and made around 10 changes that have increased the accessibility by quite a margin. I now present a list of different validation sites with comments on why this site failed to pass. […]