Yet Another Realigned Theme 22 comments
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So I started off wanting to do something as breathtaking as the award-winning Veerle’s Blog but ended up with more of a refinement of what I already had.
I was going to loot some of the clean CSS and simple design from some guy named Carl but decided to start with the Scribbish Typo theme instead. That’s a great theme and well organized. I also bought Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design a few weeks ago. Although I don’t think I used any explicit techniques from the book, it helped me to think a little more about clean CSS design (he has also tweaked his site recently). Amazingly, it looks pretty much the same in Firefox and IE 6!
Some of the design was probably influenced by looking at Basecamp all day, and the big fonts that are popular now. I love the old-style figures of a font like Georgia, so I featured those in the comment counts. My mom does calligraphy and I remember seeing her draw big fives and sixes for practice. So please stop commenting if there are already five or six comments! I want to see a big number 5 whenever I visit my site! ;-)
I still want to add a picture column with thumbnails of all my open source products on the left side. I was counting them up and I have built at least 10-12 open source projects or plugins over the last nine months!
I still need to style the comments better.
Using Custom Controllers With Typo Themes
In order to make the pluralizer work right with the newest Typo trunk, I had to do the following:
- Inherit from ContentController, not ApplicationController.
- Use the theme_layout and the article helper.
class ToolsController < ContentController layout :theme_layout helper :articles
- In your theme’s layouts/default.rhtml, include the folder path in any partials:
render :partial => 'articles/search'
Other than that, the upgrade from 2.5.0 to the Typo trunk went smoothly.
New Projects
Finally, for anyone who has read this far,
- I finished version one of Gullery: A Rails Photo Gallery
- Also, you can try out my web-based version of the Printable CEO. I’m using it daily to track my productivity and it has helped. I hope to enhance it in the future and maybe charge a tiny, shareware-ish fee. The features you see now will always be free, though. Enjoy!
Nuby on Rails
Geoffrey Grosenbach / Ruby / Code / Graphics / Design / Rails / Merb / Javascript / CSS
Nice work, I like the way it looks. Now that I’ve started commenting (trying to get your 5), when will you update Gruff? I’ve already played a little with extending it myself, but wanted to see if you have big updates planned in the near term.
Thanks (it’s a great little library).
Looks good Geoffrey. The “leave url/email” link doesn’t appear to be functioning though. It just takes me to the top of the page but doesn’t expose the extra input fields.
@ben: Weird. It works for me, but I’ll see if I can reproduce the bug on another browser.
@keith: Yeah, I need to update Gruff with a bunch of patches that have been sent. Hopefully I can do a mini-update in the next week.
Nice, realignments are definitely the way forward, nothing worse than visiting a site regularly only to find it feels completely different.
I’m having the same problem with the “leave url/email” link (using Safari 2.0.3) seems to be trying to link to the hash, maybe put javascript:; as the link for a temporary measure, I’ve had this problem with Safari before with return false.
Hmm… doing it in Firefox too?
Last post, I promise, javascript error incase it is any help:
uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open
Hope that helps.
The remixed theme looks nice. One small glitch: If you scroll down a tiny bit, the gradient of the logo image doesn’t match the gradient of the background. I assume this is because the background’s darkest section is the top of the browsing window, regardless of the scroll.
Hey Geoff,
It looks great. During one of the talks at SXSWi someone was showing a Konica-Minolta site they had done and used a JavaScript trick they had used when linking to an in-page anchor. They called it “scroll and blink” or “scroll and highlight” or something. I couldn’t find a reference on google.
It would work really nice for the link to the “comments.” When you click the link from the main page it is kind of jarring and takes a second to figure out the context of the comments (I scrolled up to see the article to figure out where I was, then back down to the comments).
I so just signed up at roughunderbelly. Inspiringsimple.
Hey Geoff,
I’m digging the updates. Just one quick thing, the logo scrolls now, so it breaks up the gradient in the background. Looks a lil (Top)Funky.
Looking forward to working with you in the near future ;)
Logo fixed.
Email/Url always on now.
Comments jumping seems to be partly due to the fact that there is a “comments” anchor and a “comments” id. I’ll try to fix that later.
I’m keeping the theme in Subversion and loving the ease of updating it. I need to find a way to sync it up with a custom Capistrano recipe to make it even easier.
1. Underbelly does not support non-English chars. 2. No way to change registration data afterwards (e.g. pass, mail) 3. I misspelled email during registration and thus did not receive a confirmation link, but successfully logged in with login/pass. 4. Fields at registration view have Rails-default pop-up hints. HTH Pavel
Geoff,
Great job man, everything looks great!
The Konica-Minolta site that jcasimir mentioned was done by Aaron Gustafson. Sadly, I don’t remember which section of the site he showed that used the scroll feature.
Been really looking forward to this, great work. Will ruin my productivity this afternoon though!
Good Job, Thanks, very helpful
Everyone loves the “scroll and flash.” ;-)
I’d be happy to hook you up with the code as soon as that site actually launches (which should be some time next week). That was a little preview for the fine folks @ SXSW.
Glad someone was awake during our session.
Aaron – small world! I would love to see that JS when you get done. Since I saw the demo I’ve thought up several places it would improve my user expereience.
Clear , really thanks
Great stuff! And HAML support would be awesome…
Am I correct in assuming that this only works when the helper is called directly from the template, as opposed to being abstracted away by some custom defined helper?
I am try!