Tweaking things

If you read this via RSS this makes no difference at all. If you’re on-site then you might notice a slight change with the template. I’m trying a modified form of the Gridlock template.

There’s a few reasons for doing this. One is that it works on an 800px monitor. Freshy, the theme I have been using here and at wordpress.com, doesn’t quite work. It also allows me to move things around to better use the space at the top of the screen. Putting the Flickr bar over the title div releases about 90px, and there’s a small saving in the title div itself. In English that means that there’s now more space on the screen for a photo when the site first loads.

The other change with how it works is there’s now a category ‘featured’. The most recent post in that category is the one that appears on the front page. The other entries appear only in the sidebar on the front page and the RSS feed. The reason for this is that the weblog is mainly about archaeology and ancient history. There are posts like this explaining what I’m up to, but really I’d far rather have the previous post Astronomy in Da Heights at the top of the page than this. There’s also a secondary feature category which I’m currently planning to use for longer term announcements. At the moment I’m using it for the recent Four Stone Hearth entry, so that it’s not going to get lost under posts like this one.

Another change is that I thought the previous theme was looking a bit gloomy for summer. This theme should look a bit better as I’ve lightened the background and changed the font headings. I’m now using Helvetica Neue – even if you don’t have it installed on you computer. This is due to the SIFR script which creates swf headers. I’ve seen scripts which replace text heading with images, but this creates cut ‘n’ pastable text objects and works with accessibility in a way that makes young web designers stroke their goatee beards with approval. ((yes, including the female designers))

The makeover isn’t finished so if you see something that isn’t working or something you’d like to see is missing then leave a comment and I’ll add it to the to-do list. One thing I don’t know is whether or not the san-serif font is an improvement or not.

There’s still a bit of grey, but remember this is a theme for summertime in the UK. Nevertheless I haven’t been able to get this tune out of my head recently.