Aral Balkan

I love K2 but I had been feeling constrained by its default 780 pixel width for some time now. So, in the spirit of New Year's, I decided to get off my ass and change it.

Through the magic of CSS (thank you, Firebug), it's goodbye old blog, hello 950 pixel wide new blog.

And, while I was at it, I scoured my friends' Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr and had some fun with the headers. (And, I've also come to the realization that without Jeremy, I wouldn't have half as many photos of myself on Flickr!)

Hope you guys enjoy the new look! :)

Comments

• Thanks for the feedback, David! @Neil: Thanks, man! Will scour Flickr further soon! :)

  by Aral on 2008-01-04 07:06:02

• Hey Aral, It's cool to see the changes, but after a few seconds, and a quick scroll down the page... I must say it doesn't quite work for me. I miss the sidebar, with the extra info, and the bunny widget which i liked so much :p Also, i'm having trouble making a difference between 'bold' and 'title of a post' (FF2 - Win XP). I like the new picture(s) in the header though. Make it less dark, and more personal. Really sorry to bring negative energy in your world, but I thought telling you the truth might just be a better idea ;) (really hope to see the bunny widget back ;)) Happy 2008 ;)

  by Ronny on 2008-01-02 23:22:25

• @Keith The missing left margin is just a temporary problem. I had it, too. Probably you still have the old CSS files in the cache. Reload and the page looks fine ..

  by Flo on 2008-01-03 00:38:54

• nice and clean, but 2 suggestions: 1. a bit of a left margin would be nice. the words just run into the black line on the left. 2. some extra space or a line between posts, or bolder larger post titles would help. on the main page, it all seems like one giant post.

  by Keith Peters on 2008-01-02 23:51:59

• I miss the sidebar too :( Isn't K2 limited to 780px wide to the number of words per line for the reason below? "The ideal line length for text layout is based on the the physiology of the human eye... At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches - about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line. Research shows that reading slows and retention rates fall as line length begins to exceed the ideal width, because the reader then needs to use the muscles of the eye and neck to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next line. If the eye must traverse great distances on the page, the reader is easily lost and must hunt for the beginning of the next line. Quantitative studies show that moderate line lengths significantly increase the legibility of text." Also that header is huge! Takes up half the screen on my 1440 x 900 res. I guess I'll get used to it ;). Happy new year bud!

  by Tink on 2008-01-03 10:16:14

• Looks great, Aral. Good work.

  by meekish on 2008-01-03 15:58:14

• At first I thought you'd lost your marbles and had replaced a stylish layout with an unreadable mess. Then I saw the comments about caching of CSS files. A quick refresh and it is now much better. I think your title is way too big though. On a 1280x800 laptop running firefox, the title takes up pretty much the whole window.

  by David Arno on 2008-01-03 19:13:06

• Aral If you ever want to use one of my photos, please feel free. I only don't use Creative Commons because there have been too many violations by people not understanding the terms. Love the new look. - Neil.

  by Neil Ford on 2008-01-03 21:42:38

• I'm seeing a pretty new look now: looks awesome now (maybe i had the css caching problem too). Great work, Aral!

  by Ronny on 2008-01-06 02:10:32

• Hi guys, Thanks for the feedback. I believe the left margin disappearance issue is a caching problem as Flo pointed out. @Keith: I've made the post titles larger and made the post headers more prominent. @Ronny: The sidebar is going to be coming back (not sure where it went) and the bunny widget too. Those are temporary bugs :) @Tink: It's actually a ratio between font size, line width and the leading. I'm tweaking them as I go.

  by Aral on 2008-01-03 11:47:17

• The bunny widget is back and it's actually a Wordpress widget now. The sidebar is a little different as I'm using Wordpress widgets now instead of the K2 asides. I also made a SWFObject Wordpress plugin that simply includes it in the header (so neither the blog not K2 are hacked in any way any longer -- yay!) :) I'm going to be fiddling with the site as I have time in the coming days but I have some other pressing things to attend to (namely making my accountants happy -- yuck! -- and Singularity).

  by Aral on 2008-01-03 13:12:39