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Out with the old, in with the new!

Since the weekend a week ago, I have integrated many (nearly countless) minor and major changes to the website.

Sitewide Changes

I started out, more or less accidentally, with the reconstruction of the menue. As you already might have noticed, you find the navigation bar in the right sidebar now, and no longer below the logo image. Also, I have changed some of the entries (and their appropriate locations within the file system) and the menue is now purely text based.

After these modifications followed the addition of the library, which is the gentle home of my Links and Resources, my publications and my sandbox, where I will (hopefully) regularly (at least frequently) publish examples, little helpers, design resources and experiments in CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Changes to the Blog

Then, I started the porting and moving of the blog from Serendipity v.0.5 to Serendipity v.0.7-beta3, which wasn't easy, but also not too hard.

After the first two days using my freshly updated blogging system, I really have to say: Serendipity just rocks! Besides too much new features and bug fixes to mention, Serendipity is (at last from now on, IMHO) fully fitted to take the competition with other widespread popular blogging tools, such as Movable Type or Wordpress.

The only thing the system is still lacking (or to use different words: which support could be improved), is the proper use of semantically correct markup, partly within the source of the blogging engine itself and partly within the entries (and that is directly related to the article editing within the authoring suite).

So, to sum it up: The blog is now better than ever before. And, if you haven't noticed I also updated the site's default theme, which is a lot slicker and more stylish (IMHO) now.

Changes within the Blog

And because CSS rocks too (and that matter of fact is known by everybody of you, of course), it's now possible to style the blog in one way and the administration interface in another. I.e styling the blog header (the logo image above) like so:

DIV#serendipity_banner {

  background:

    transparent

    url("{TEMPLATE_PATH}img/logo.jpg")

    no-repeat 0 0;

  padding: 0;

  margin: 0;

  width: 540px;

  height: 258px;

}



DIV#serendipity_banner H1,

DIV#serendipity_banner H2 {

  background: transparent;

  padding: 0;

  margin: 0;

}

While styling the Serendipity Authoring and Administration Suite header totally different, like so:

BODY.s9y_wrap DIV#serendipity_banner {

  background:

    #fff

    url("{TEMPLATE_PATH}img/admin_banner.jpg")

    repeat-x left bottom;

  padding: 1em 0;

  border-top: 1px solid #ccc0c0;

  border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc0c0;

  margin: 0.6em 0;

  width: 100%;

  height: auto;

}



BODY.s9y_wrap DIV#serendipity_banner H1,

BODY.s9y_wrap DIV#serendipity_banner H2 {

  font-size: large;

  color: #300;

  padding: 0 0.6em;

  margin: 0;

}

Final remarks

After doing so much good to the site and its users (that is you), I hope, I can do even more. Within the coming days and weeks, I will hopefully continually increase the number of articles and examples in the sandbox. And maybe, someone of you likes to share his/her thoughts about all this.

Be good, have fun!

Read: Introducing Changes

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