May 20, 2003

This last week sucked. I had thought of a better idea a while back, but I've had so much work that I couldn't get around to finishing it. Well, I finally have a couple of more laid back days, so I can work on it. The new design has three main components that I had to figure out. One, how to dynamically change the background of the page. That was easy enough to do using an old style-switcher script I had lying around (i used it on NoisE4). Two, how to change the size of divs dynamically. Also easy, also the style-switcher. Three, making a semi-transparent background. This is bolloks. There had been an article about making PNGs work correctly on A List Apart. I finally looked into it, modified it a bit, and tried it. It sorta worked. The only problem was that I couldn't actually use the links on the page. Just select them or read them. Had to change it. After examining the code for a bit, I figured out that I could use some other kind of filter to make transparencies. I got this one to work. However, the colors are different between browsers, so I'm working on a more definate fix. I'd show some sample pages, but there's really nothing impressive to show since I'm just testing code and not incorporating design at all. More later, i guess.

May 03, 2003

I thought of a decent design on wednesday, right before I left for class. During class, I considered a few things, did some sketches, and came up with a design I'll most likely use for the next ximwix. A few busy days later, I sat down and started to work on the design in photoshop. This proved to be a bit more difficult than I had thought, since the top portion of the page and the nav are going to be done in flash and set on top of everything. I really like to be able to see the entire design in one place first, but I'm not sure that it will be possible unless I do some tricky exporting with flash. Oh well.

Don't take this as a sign of progress, though. The site is going to be...different. I know what I want to do, but I'm still working out how to organize it and put it on a website. No matter how i do that, there's going to be a few different 'skins' for the design. I probably shouldn't try to describe it until I've got it all figured out in my head. More on that later, I guess.

Anyway, here's some pics:
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