I finally broke down and redid the main page of my site.

It works in IE, but you’re missing out on the menus if you aren’t using a standards compliant browser.

It was in some ways a painfully long weekend, and in other ways the weekend was entirely too short.

I’m still having issues with my depression. Destroying my cell phone on Saturday didn’t help matters, not did having to plunk down $400 to replace it. But. That’s why we have savings–so when things break (for whatever reason) they can be replaced. So it’s just no new computer for me anytime soon.

The depression was incredibly frustrating. Just one of those days where I can’t stand being inside my own skin, and nothing I did really allowed me to escape myself, although I did managed to distract myself.

I kept busy by doing a fair amount of web design over the weekend, rebuilding the WordPress template for my book blog and then recreating the same style for the book pages of my website. I’m overdue a rebuild of my main page, but I don’t have a clue what I want to do with it, and abandoning the color scheme means having to create a new set of images. Since I’ve got probably 30 or so images that randomly appear, that idea is rather unappealing right now.

Speaking of images, I test drove Adobe Elements over the weekend. I have Photoshop at work, but there is no way I am going to pay that much money for a software package, and I’m one of those weirdos that refuses to pirate software or music, to Elements seemed the logical choice.

Having played with it, it seems precisely what I need, so at some point I’m going to have to cough up the money for that. But it’ll be worth it, because it’ll be nice to do image work at home (and goodbye to Corel Photopaint 10).

The predicted storms never came, so Saturday afternoon was sunny, as was today, so I got to get out and enjoy the flowers, just a little bit. And posted the requisite Sunday Flower Pr0n.

I also finally finished my review for A Short History of Myth.

Here’s to hoping this week goes smoothly.

I’ve been working on the graphics for my book blog, and also added the new design to the rest of the books portion of my site (which is not WordPress).

So there should be a mostly seamless transition between the WordPress portion of the site and the pages I created. The only issue is that there is a small margin/padding issue I cannot for the life of me work out, so the side border is just a teeny bit off. Humph.

ADDENDUM the First:
I also changed the color schemes to match the images.

ADDENDUM the Second:
And IE 6 or lower doens’t render png images correctly, so the header image will look wonky. Too bad. It works fine in all my other browsers, so you’ll just have to live with it.

So, despite the fact that IE sucks, otherwise the new theme seems to be working well.

If you’re curious how it worked, what you’re looking at is something like this:

Here’s what goes in the index page:

<div id="wrap">
<div id="content">

Posts go here

<div id="bottom">
<p>This is text at the bottom of the page. Maybe. Maybe not.</p>
</div>

</div> <!– content? –>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?><!– opens two separate include files, sidebar 1 and sidebar 2 –>

</div> <!– wrap? –>

And here’s that part of the style sheet:

/* This division contains the remaining divisions in the design */
#wrap {
width:100%;
text-align:left;
min-width:75em;
}

/* This division contains the main content, including the posts */
#content {
float:left;
left: 0;
top: 185px;
width: 71%;
min-width: 33em;
max-width:58em;
padding: 2em;
min-height: 225em;
}

#sidebar_1 {
float:left;
width:15em;
padding:.75em;
}

#sidebar_2 {
float:left;
width:15em;
padding:.75em;
}

What I need to do is place both sidebars in another container, so that the second slidebar doesn’t slip under the content when viewing a single, short post.

What worked was placing a min-height in the content area.

Please let me know if you’re having trouble with this format in any browser besides IE6.

Oh, and that bottom section will eventually have something in it. Once I figure out what wants to go there. (I wanted something that stretched 100% like the top image, but no luck with that yet.

One of the things I talk about when I teach web design is the main page for your site. If you have a website of any complexity, you want your main page/splash page to help people find what they’re looking for.

Weblogs are nice and all, but it’s very difficult to find your way around someone’s site if you find them through their weblog. Frankly, most people assume that’s all their is and look no further, but I think it’s interesting to see what else people have to say about themselves.

Since as I mentioned before, this weblog is not all there is to my website, my splash page has links to take you wherever else you’d like to go.

As with the book page, you can view the page with IE, but the menus don’t work IE (the worst thing is they almost work IE7, but not entirely, which is worse than not working at all). So you really want to use Firefox or Safari or anything else. Then you’ll get to see the menus, which make me very very happy.

I was pretty much elated for a week when I got the menus to work.

What if you’re using IE? The buttons take you to a main page, and from there you can access the pages available on the sub menu.

Then again, the layout of the page also makes me squeal with glee. (You did know I was easily amused, right?) I love the way the layout moves when the page is resized. I learned more about web design working on that page than on anything else, because that’s where I’d test things as I’d learn them.

But to give credit where credit is due, Michael created the random image and quote generators for me. I could do it myself now, but when I initially decided what I wanted, he wrote the code for me. So yay Michael!

You may notice that the splash page has a title that doesn’t make much sense. At the bottom there’s a link for “the little cyclops puppy” and you can see where the title came from.

It won’t make a lot of sense even then, but that’s what the title of my site has been since 1998, and it seems silly to change now.

You’ll also see links to the Cats page, where you can see pictures of my fine felines. There is also a link to the Quotes page, so if you want to read all my random quotes at once, plus some quotes that didn’t get put into the random quote generator, that’s the place to go.

The most popular page is the Morgantownies site. This is a page that was created by Gina, Erin, and me one day when we were really bored, and has snowballed out of control since then. Someone e-mailed me and told me I should enter everything into a database and make the page searchable and add photos…

No. It started as a lark. I’ll continue to maintain it, but I do NOT have the time to invest in creating a database and entering the data, and I definitely don’t have the time to make a searchable index, and adding photo–to do it right would chew up bandwidth like you wouldn’t believe. This is a site I pay for myself, and aside from the Amazon links, I don’t have advertising, and I plan to keep it that way.

Maybe one day when I’m rich and have oodles of free time. But not today, this week, or this year.

There are other pages as well, many of which have not been updated in a disgustingly long time. One day I may do something about that, but again, not today.

So there you go. My website is more than my weblog. Feel free to go explore and have fun. Or not. Either way is fine with me.