Arnt Richard Johansen's home page

arj.nvg.org takes to the sea

Summer has begun, and I'm fed up with the old look of my home page. Not only is black-on-white sooo 2004, but the CSS was a shoddy cut-and-paste job from a how-to web site that cared way too much about supporting bugs in legacy browsers, and way too little about liquid layout, simplicity, and portability.

So I sat down with some new tutorials, and redid the style sheet with beautiful floating boxes in as simple CSS code as I could manage. At the suggestion of Taliesin, the creator of the excellent CALS site, I used Colorhunter as an aid to select the colour scheme.

I had imagined a particular kind of steely blue sea in the header, so I typed “stormy sea” into Flickr's advanced search page, filtering for pictures licenced under Creative Commons. In less than five minutes, I had found a perfect fit — the photo by Anne Ruthmann that you see above — cropped and resized it in Gimp, and set it as the background for the H1 element. Salty!

The new layout should work in any browser, and you should be able to look at it in a maximized window on a screen width of up to 1600 pixels before the header starts to look funny. If you have Firefox or Safari, you will even see the rounded corners on the boxes, which is a preview of the border-radius feature that is slated for inclusion in CSS3. Please let me know if something looks wrong.

I have two more posts in the works, and both have to do with digital audio. After that, I may or may not go on blogging hiatus again. Until then: stay subscribed. :-)

[Friday, Jun 27, 2008 @ 23:35] | [] | # | G