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September 03, 2005

Finally: new website design

It's only taken months of effort, and I can't believe how much work it was, but I've finally deployed my new website design. The actual creative part was done by the great Chris Mospaw, but since there was no way I could essentially go offline while I converted the whole site en masse, so I had to organize this in a way compatible with routine site updates.

I maintain my site content in the excellent Perforce source code control system, and I created a separate branch for the new content. The heavy lifting of any new design is in the CSS, but I also have a lame, home-grown markup processor written in perl that translates .web to .html. It's very lame, but functional enough.

So over the last several months, I've been migrating the common markup to be compatible with both old and new designs, minimizing the number of files that actually differed. This required visiting almost 200 content pages to migrate to the new markup, and the tedium was compounded by the difficulties due to not knowing CSS that well.

Finally I've gotten it deployed and off my list. There are still a few glitched (the lower right corner doesn't look right in IE), and I'll probably never stop fooling with it, but I don't think it's any worse than the old layout. I've even gotten my weblog to partly share the look.

Those finding things horribly wrong are encouraged to let me know.

Thanks again, Chris.

Posted by steve at September 3, 2005 10:08 PM

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Comments

Steve, it was my pleasure to help you with the design. You have helped me with so many projects, being able to give back a tiny bit is the least I can do. I hope the new design serves you well and expresses the top-notch guy you are.

Posted by: Chris Mospaw at September 16, 2005 01:40 PM