An Aside: Fall Reboot 2005
As you probably know, I participated in this year’s Fall Reboot together with over 900 other people. All in all, it was a successful reboot, despite the weirdness that crept in when voting started. Apparently some people thought it a good idea to vote themselves up on the list, an easy thing to do because the voting system was merely cookie-based. It is unfortunate that a lot of the discussion on the reboot site revolved around this issue and I’m sure that things will be handled differently next time.
I was both happy and sad to see my site do surprisingly well on the reboot. Happy, because it supported my moving away from tables completely, sad because the reboot should also be about the coding of a site, and mine quite frankly sucks. I just replaced my old table soup with a somewhat non-standard CSS soup which validates but does not do these standards justice. Still, it is motivation enough to attack that issue as soon as I can.
Several sites I voted up on the list because I simply liked what I saw, admired the coding, the style or whatever. My faorite one was CoreDreams by Invitro Studio. Surprisingly, my two favorite sites are dark ones this time around, something I myself moved away from many years ago, but CoreDreams is very tastefully done with lots of really nifty details and an overall style that doesn’t break anywhere. Very consistent. The second site was Matt Brett’s homepage. It’s black, and I usually hate that, but Matt just did such a fine job that it made me totally forget my dislike of the color in webdesign. The third site is one of the newer school of design so often seen on the various CSS showcases, and in that sense it is almost retro again, but I just liked Trevor Delamorandiere’s sense of color and proportion on his site, Personal Development.
There were other sites I liked a lot, for example Vladimir Agafonkin’s Solitary Thoughts (I just like that header to death), but all in all I got turned off by the aforementioned voting debacle. A lot of sludge kept (re-)appearing near the top - pretty shoddy “design” or other companies pimping their wares, or nerds trying to outsmart the voting system by “scripting” their sites to numero uno until they got booted - and one couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the fun had been taken out by those people. I felt a bit sorry for Adam Howell, who had put so much work into this project, but I think he could still feel the support from all the people.
Recent changes here:
Since the lauch of my new website, I have changed the deus62.com website completely. The blogging feature was removed there to not distract from the main site here (the one you’re reading at the moment), the page was redesigned, and a Vanilla forum was added to the domain. Livingwithmusic.com had a few bugs removed (I hate that panicky feeling when you spot the bug and have the feeling that a million reboot visitors are visiting this instant and are wondering why you are even participating in the reboot) and had three feeds (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 03, all three at the very bottom of each page) added.
Now I’ll get back to adding content. If there’s one thing the studying of my past failures and 900+ reboot sites taught me, it is that a site will really only work with regular updates and good content. I intend to do that here, so see you tomorrow when the new post goes up.
Thanks for the kind words! Much appreciated.
I really like the layering effect you’ve got going here. If you sit right back and bloor your vision a bit it jumps right out of the screen. Nicely done!
One more…
Just noticed your RSS 2.0 link in the footer is linking to the 1.0 feed.
Thanks for kind words,Matt.
I fixed the RSS link.
Wow, an RSS! Subscribed. :-) The last step would be to add it as a link to the head section of the code, I mean like that:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0” href="..." />This would allow much more comfortable way to subscribe to it.
As for the content, I’m glad that you found a great topic to write about and are able to update the site often. I choose to write about web development because it’s what I’m good at, but it just seems that everything related was already said before me. :-)
Oh, one more remark: smilies in the comments seem to have a huge unneeded margin on my Firefox 1.0.
Yeah, I turned smileys off for now. I know where the error is and made a note of it for the next overhaul. Thanks for the heads up.
I’m new to feeds. Do I put the full link in there with http or without? And can I do that on all three feeds, 1.0, 2.0 and Atom 0.3? And, what can you do when it’s in there? Questions, questions, …
Hey man, love the design now that it’s done. With your feeds, you can name them all in the head of your document as Vladimir showed above. I shall be sure to subscribe.
To see how the feed links look like, you can simply visit my website again and view the source. They’re near the top, under the stylesheet link in the head section.
Thanks, guys!
Thanks for the mention, I am actually quite impressed both my sites are doing so well with everything. I didn’t think they would attract such attention. Love your site, ill be subscribing to the feed :)
Trevor.