Revamped: My personal blog

Post by **yellowled** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 3:01 pm

Hey guys,

I've revamped http://matthias.yellowled.de/ (my personal blog) once again, and like everyone among us, I'm eager for praise, criticism, bug reports, ie issues and other comments of any kind. Speaking of ie issues - if you think this looks pretty dull and you're using ie6 or even earlier, try a "real" browser like Firefox or ie7

So this is kind of "work in progress" - as usual. I'm using my personal blog for a test run before I release this template, probably with some extra colorsets, in probably/maybe a few weeks. However, this is a very personalized template, so critisizing any feature might get you an "I don't care, I want it that way!". Don't take it personal

Thanks to Don Chambers, who came up with the addthis.com code.

So, let's hear it

YL

Post by **Don Chambers** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 3:49 pm

Nice!!!

Post by **jhermanns** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 4:16 pm

sweet! just a little more polishing for show&shine here and there and i love it

Post by **Don Chambers** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 4:28 pm

I took a closer look. You might want to change your id & class names so they use those more common to s9y. It might not make any difference for your personal use, but there are a number of plugins that look for these specific id & class names to function correctly.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 4:58 pm

Very nice, well done. Is this your own design? Will you be keeping it for yourself or releasing it. I'm in favour of keeping it for yourself, that way your site is unique.

Post by **yellowled** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 5:59 pm

jhermanns wrote:sweet! just a little more polishing for show&shine here and there and i love it

Not sure what you mean by "polishing for show & shine", so "-vvv, please"

YL

Post by **yellowled** » Mon Nov 12, 2007 6:14 pm

carl_galloway wrote:Very nice, well done. Is this your own design?

Thank you. Yes, it is, widely inspired by a great German book ("Praxisbuch Web 2.0" by Vitaly Friedman, a great source for inspiration) I read recently and of course the experiences of the Bulletproof development.

carl_galloway wrote:Will you be keeping it for yourself or releasing it. I'm in favour of keeping it for yourself, that way your site is unique.

I was planning on releasing it, possibily with some additional colorsets. However, Don might be right - this might need some modifications to work in other blogs ... we'll see.

YL

Post by **Don Chambers** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 2:49 am

Impressive - XHTML STRICT!!!

Another question - why are you defining your blog title and description as a <dl>???

Post by **yellowled** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 8:42 am

Don Chambers wrote:Impressive - XHTML STRICT!!!

I don't think it's impressive, it's another reason why this is probably not suited for release

For me, XHTML Stict was the natural choice. When I started to seriously do websites, XHTML was simply the recommendation for new sites. (Actually, this is why I don't like layout tables - I've never really used them, so I'm used to div layouts

)

I'm writing my blog entries in XHTML Strict, so it seemed the logical choice to do the .tpl files in Strict, too. The real surprise is that the index page of the blog actually validates (Yes, the validator buttons in the footer work. Yes, both of them and without having to enter an URI.) as XHTML Strict - after some minor adjustments.

Don Chambers wrote:Another question - why are you defining your blog title and description as a <dl>???

This came up as an alternative during the accessibility blog parade. When we started to redo Robert's blog, one of the experts mentioned screen reader users might prefer it if the entry title was an h1. So what do you do with the blog title and description. I love definition lists, you can do almost anything with them, so I thought about this. I think it makes sense: the title is the definiton term, the description is, well, the definition description. You might want to argue whether a list with just one element is actually supposed to be a list, but it seemed better semantically than div soup ...

YL

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 9:13 am

I've been using h1 on the entry title for some time now, mostly because I wanted to improve my AdSense earnings, but finding out it also has accessibility benefits is really nice. Thanks for sharing that nugget of wisdom.

@Don, might be time to think about changing your templates to match that, given that you're in the US and accessibility lawsuits seem to be popping up everywhere. Probably not so much for your personal blog, but the chicago loop site might be considered to be less personal and accessibility requirements might affect it.

@YL, are you able to post more details of the h1 accessibility thing. As a project we might have to start thinking about how the code impacts this, especially for US and UK users. s9y is increasingly being adopted for business use, and these designs might need to be updated. If pro SEO and webdesigners read this, take note, I'm pointing my finger right at you.

Post by **yellowled** » Tue Nov 13, 2007 10:10 am

carl_galloway wrote:@YL, are you able to post more details of the h1 accessibility thing

Let me explain the whole thing first: Robert was contacted by an accessibility expert from Austria. They did a workshop at an Austrian BarCamp together, analyzing Robert's blog in terms of accessibility, which led to this little project of redoing his blog. One of the first suggestions was to make the entry title an h1. Apparently and if I remember correctly (I'd have to check my mail archives), this makes it easier to navigate in screen readers and non-visual browsers.

On the other hand, there has been slight critisism. Apparently, screen readers and non-visual browsers don't have or conform to standards much better than visual browsers. What's good in one screen reader is bad in teh other - we know this from visual browsers. So the whole entry title/h1 thing seems to be different in various screen readers/non-visual browsers.

The whole accessibility project is not finished yet, so this may get clearer in the future. I'm sure Robert is going to post his "results" here (probably in the German forum) or in his personal blog once he's sorted them out.

YL