Nor Redesign, Nor Realign

A quick overview of the new site

Posted on 2008-03-27 10:00:00 in Design and tagged as neo-geek.net 

Welcome to the latest iteration of neo-geek.net; my online sandbox, container of thoughts and knowledge. This version is powered by the Overseer Framework, a framework I developed to help speed up development of PHP based applications by removing the need for coding simple everyday functionality. The content of the site is managed by the Overseer CMS, which is also powered by the Overseer Framework.

As the title of this post suggests, I do not think of this as a redesign nor realign as the design and layout of the site are basically the same as before. While the code base got a complete refresh, the design was kept the same as I was content with the previous design layout. While the functionality of the site is still very similar, most of that functionality has been tailored to make the data contained in each section easier to manage. Below are a few of the sections explained in further detail.

Journal Entries and Articles

The journal entries and articles stand the same as before, except comments aren't normally active in articles. They also support extended content which is only shown when entering a single journal entry or article. And like all other pages on this site, each entry has it's own simple permalink structure.

Comments

The comment system is the same as before except that each comment post requires that the user's browser has HTTP referers enabled. This is one out of a few simple security steps that have put into place to prevent unwanted comments. Each comment has it's own permalink, as before, to allow for direct linking to each specific comments.

The Archive

The archive, like any other, makes it easy to view all past journal entries and articles. The search field at the top of the page allows for you to search through specific categories and choose where in the entries you want to search; title, title and contents, or tags. As for all of the journal entries and articles from the previous iteration of this site, they are not going to be included in the archive for some time.

Resources

The resources page is one of my favorite updates to the site as the content in this section is no longer static but driven by an OPML file that can be downloaded and imported into a feed reader.

The Design

While trying to come up with a new design for this version of the site I found myself drifting back to the previous design as I enjoyed it's one column layout, light on dark color scheme, and simplistic navigation. I did however want to polish up the design with better handling of line-heights, margins and padding, and new minimalistic header. I also spiced up the color scheme with text-shadows on most of the text within the site (only works in Safari) and semi-transparent background colors.

As for all other aspects of the site, they stand the same as before. I do however plan on focusing more on writing posts and releasing open source projects more frequently than before. Thank you for your interest in neo-geek.net, and enjoy.