Sunday, January 29, 2006

Gone With The “Blah Blah Blog” Look

Why haven’t I posted anything new in a couple of weeks? Well, I’ve been busy working on a new blog design. You’re looking at it right now.

The old design (preserved in a screen shot for posterity here) was simply a template that came with the ExpressionEngine blog software I use. But I decided I needed something a bit more creative than the same old “blah blah blog” look.

Designing a blog is more challenging than creating a static web site. With a blog, pages are generated dynamically, so you have to allow for varying content. For example, when I upload a new post, the “Recent Entries” sidebar at the right automatically reflects it.

Creating this new blog design taught me a lot about using cascading style sheets (CSS), which makes it easier to design a site and make changes. CSS isn’t all that new, but I’d never really spent much time reading about it.

In the old days of web design, you had an HTML page, which contained the layout, style information for the text (size, color, font, etc.), and the content itself. With layout, style, and content all embedded in the same document, making changes was a nightmare – especially if you had dozens or hundreds of pages.

With CSS, however, layout and style information is stored in one separate document on your server. HTML pages contain just content. When you want to make content changes, it’s easier to find it in your HTML page. When you want to make style and layout changes, you don’t have to change every page. You simply update your one style sheet.

For example, if I wanted to add more space between the left side of the window and this column of copy, I’d just update my style sheet – and every page on this site would reflect that change. The same holds true if I wanted to change the size, color, or font- of this text.

The idea for CSS has been kicking around for more than a decade, but it took several years for the various browsers to incorporate most of its capabilities. Now, it’s pretty much standard, so I’m glad I learned something about it.

Posted by Richard Bloch

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