Paul Stone

Style Sheet Changes

I said I was out of the web design business, but I did have to make a few small tweaks to the style sheets (CSS) for this site.

TypePad seems to have a little bit of a scam going, not that I'm really complaining.  The default configuration doesn't leave enough room on the left margins of the area which contains the blog entries (posts), nor does it leave enough room between paragraphs.  White space is very important to readability, but the only way to fix these white space issues without moving to advanced templates (exactly what I was trying to get away from) is to upgrade to the TypePad Pro level. 

The Pro level TypePad account allows you to make changes to the style sheet without losing all of the easy-to-use GUI layout/design capability.  Your style sheet changes are appended at the end, so therefore you can override anything you want.

Here are my style sheet additions:

#alpha-inner
{
        margin-left: 50px;
        margin-right: 10px;
}

p { margin-top: 24px; margin-bottom: 24px; }

Default configuration with a two-column layout has the alpha column on the far left.  Alpha-inner seems to be the container within that column in which the blog posts go.  So, I increased the left and right margins of that area.  Much nicer!

Now, I still had to fix the paragraph spacing.  This is such a basic style setting, it should really be modifiable with the TypePad design tools.  Not knowing any better, I changed the top and bottom margins for the paragraph style for the whole website.  So far, it seems like this only affects posts.  I may find later on that it screws up my category or archive links in the sidebar, but right now it looks fine.  The top and bottom paragraph margins in reality occupy the same space, so I just set them to the same amount.

Now, the website is halfway readable.  I'm excited!

I used a really cool Firefox extension to help me figure out how to make these changes.  I'll comment on that in an upcoming post.

UPDATE: I also changed the line-height.  The online design tools either put the lines of text too far apart, or too close together.  This works pretty well.

body
{
        line-height: 120%;
}

I'm Blogging Again

My year-long blogging sabbatical is over.  Why the long hiatus?

1. I was getting pounded with trackback and comment spam.
2. I was spending way too much time editing CSS and HTML.

Look, I'm an engineer, and I'm supposed to be pretty technical, but I don't want to make a career out of website design.  If I'm going to do any programming, it's going to be in C, C++, or perhaps Ruby.  So, I decided to try TypePad.  I figured that I'll let them take care of the spammers, keep the Movable Type  software upgraded and running (hopefully) smoothly, and help me out with some basic templates.  This website is guaranteed to not be pretty, but then the old one never was very good looking either.

For posterity's sake, here is a snapshot of the old weblog:

Yep!  Looks like something an engineer would draw up.  Just the facts, ma'am.

Now I'm out of the website design business, not that I was ever really in to begin with.  I enjoyed the learning process, but it became a huge time-sink for me. 

I probably won't carry over the old posts.  I've exported them to a text file, so I could import them into the new blog.  But, a lot of them were dependent upon my user-defined style sheets, and I don't want to deal with that headache.  Time for a fresh start!

The Moblog to the right is new.  Pictures I snap on my cell phone camera, mostly.  People who are close to me may appreciate them.  Others - maybe not so much.  :)