Dora and I have a new game called Poke the Baby
, which is exactly what it sounds like. Dora is in her third trimester, and the baby’s movement is clearly visible, sometimes even through a sweatshirt. And having learned in our So You’re Gonna Be A Parent Bwahahahaha class that a baby’s movement is the best sign of a baby’s health, we now take turns poking Dora’s belly and waiting for the baby to poke back. Then I cup my hands around my mouth, lean down, and shout, Don’t get too comfortable in there, kid!
He usually pokes back at that too. I’m aware that some couples subject their babies to Shakespeare and classical music and stuff. Oh well. At least we know our baby’s healthy.
We went to Whole Foods (nee Fresh Fields) the other day and ordered lunch. I am of the opinion that you can never go wrong with anything that has Santa Fe
in the name — Santa Fe chicken, Santa Fe fajitas, Santa Fe wraps, and so forth. So when I saw that they could make me a Santa Fe Surprise
, it was the obvious choice. As we sat down, Dora asked, What are you having?
A Santa Fe Surprise,
I replied dramatically. What’s the surprise?
she joked. After two or three bites, I discovered the answer: There’s no meat. I paid six bucks for this crappy little sandwich, and there’s no meat.
Surprise!
Here is iteration #6, entitled Redesign Surprise
. Many thanks to Leslie for teaching me everything I know about brightness, contrast, color, and balance — which is to say, surprisingly little, but more than I knew last week.
Update: Here is iteration #7. Still sucks rocks in IE/Win and Safari. Oh, and if anyone knows a clever way to vertically center text within a box with CSS, preferably something that actually works and doesn’t require the evil nested <span> tags I’m using now, I would be eternally grateful and would sing songs of you to my grandchildren and so forth and so on. Or at least link to you once or twice. Thank you.
Update: Never mind. Before I even posted that last update, I figured it out myself. Padding. Duh. Here is iteration #8. If anyone could tell me why the rollovers are somewhat borked in Safari and completely borked in IE/Win, the previous offer of eternal gratitude and song-singing stands.
Is the surprise that it doesn’t look very good in Firebird?
Admittedly I’m on Debian, therefore Firebird 0.6.1, but it’s not that far behind the bleeding edge.
Comment by Andy Todd — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:08 pm
Seems to work fine on Firebird 0.7 on windows,
probably the best of the new designs, but I still like the current design :/
Comment by Donald Noble — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:15 pm
Oh, it probably looks like crap on anything but Mozilla 1.5 on Windows. I haven’t gotten to the “niggly little browser bugs” phase yet, although I do already know that the navigation squares trigger a bug in Safari (allegedly fixed post-1.1), and that they flicker horribly in IE 6. If Firebird on Debian is having other issues, a screenshot would be helpful.
Comment by Mark — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:17 pm
Scratch that, I was just giddy with the knowledge that I’d be the first person to post a comment.
After I had actually let the page fully load it looked fine. Sorry to be a nuisance, I’ll get me coat.
Comment by Andy Todd — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:21 pm
Oh God, don’t tell me I have to start moderating “First post” comments. :) Glad to hear it’s not a problem though. I’m really not looking forward to the “niggly little browser bugs” phase. This phase is so much more fun.
Comment by Mark — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:24 pm
It looks quite nice in Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 on Redhat, except one small sticky wicket; your font choice. I don’t know what font it is, but it’s ALWAYS difficult to read when bloggers use it. I’m seeing some sort of serif font, but it’s a bit broken. Maybe I should say, not smooth. Jagged. I don’t know.
I’m just trying for the ol’ constructive criticism bit and I’m babbling.
It’s my two cents. Hope it helps. :)
Comment by Jennifer — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:32 pm
Looks good in Camino also.
I like the light blue as a background color when hovering over links!
Comment by Chris Burkhardt — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 2:38 pm
Leslie picked the blue. I didn’t even know it existed. Isn’t it pretty? Thanks, Leslie!
Comment by Mark — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 3:36 pm
Oh nice.
Comment by Matt — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 3:38 pm
We went to see _Blade II_ when my wife was in her third trimester. The soundtrack certainly inspired the youngun to advertise his good health….
Comment by Seth Gordon — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 3:45 pm
Looks good to me. I like the way the squares with links “swell” on mouseover—kind of like a baby responding to attention.
Jennifer, the font looks like Georgia to me. Is it perhaps because you have anti-aliasing turned on and want it off? Or perhaps you’ve got it off, and would prefer it on.
Comment by Michael — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 3:56 pm
Really like this. Looks good on Firebird 0.7/win.
Comment by Menc — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 4:11 pm
I’d enjoy having all of the boxes swell as I moved my mouse over them, but then I’d want the border on the navigation ones to thicken/darken too, so I’d still know they were links.
It’d be of no use, but it’d be fun to sway the mouse back and forth over the header area.
Comment by Dave Bug — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 4:18 pm
Wow, I love what you’ve done, Mark. And it works perfectly in Opera 7.20 (a shame about IE, though). I can’t pinpoint what makes it better. Must be the new color and the :hover effect. Excellent work.
Comment by Håvard Skjæveland — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 4:21 pm
Whole foods has a sit down eatery? That’s cool. I haven’t been to any of Wellspring’s other stores beside the Fresh Market on Falls of Neuse Road. I’ll have to check out Whole Foods one of these days. I hear it’s close to me. I live in the triangle of Leesville, Ray, and Lynn Roads.
I’m a big fan of Baja Fresh. Really can’t go wrong there :)
Comment by Eli Sarver — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 5:55 pm
Tasty.
According to the CSS Validator, you didn’t specify color: when specifying background-color: in del.diff {} and span.modify {} . Bad Mark. :P
Comment by kami — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 5:57 pm
> Bad Mark. :P
No, bad mark-up.
Comment by Eli Sarver — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 6:22 pm
kami: good call. Actually it was a typo, now fixed. See? Validation is a useful debugging tool, as long as you stay close enough to validating that you don’t get overwhelmed. But you knew that. It always amazes me how many people *don’t* know that. It’s like flying blind. Web design is hard enough as it is, and involves enough second-guessing, without having to wonder whether invalid markup is the cause of your latest quirk.
Comment by Mark — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 6:56 pm
okay, dunno when you added this, but the growing rollovers are outstanding.
Comment by sleeper — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 7:46 pm
Keeps getting better.
Comment by James LaBove — Monday, November 10, 2003 @ 11:58 pm
Hey Mark, I was just thinking that if you gave your links ‘width: 100%;’ on that front page b-links section, then it’d make navigating them easier - you wouldn’t need to place the cursor directly over the text, but rather just in the ‘row’ you were interested in.
Get what I mean?
I prefer to run my cursor down the right-hand-side of menus like that; it means I can still read the text without having it obscured by the cursor. Giving links ‘width: 100%’ means that I can do that and still be able to ‘click’ my chosen link.
Just a thought as the first thing that struck me.
Comment by Dunstan — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 5:35 am
Looks good in Mozilla 1.5, the rollovers work too.
Comment by Jason — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 8:36 am
My baby always stops moving as soon as daddy puts his hand on my belly. He doesn’t respond to voices right now, but I can feel him moving.
Comment by Auburn — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 8:38 am
Love this version. Looks great in Camino.
Comment by Stephanie — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 9:16 am
Superb! (But where are the b-links down the right?)
All you need to add now are titles for each image so we can see who the people are on hover.
Great work! Don’t be tempted to change it too quickly.
Comment by chris hester — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 10:45 am
Just thought I’d let you know: your current design is unreadable in all my current browsers (Opera 7.01, Firebird 0.6.1, Mozilla 1.4 and, of course IE6 – running on XP) if the browser width is smaller than your content width, as the main (or in fact, all) content overflows the left margin and is hidden. While I guess this would only be a critical issue for people with very narrow monitors and unusual resolutions, it’s probably not a good idea.
Comment by Ned — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 12:22 pm
Ned, that feedback is appreciated. I am aware of the problem and have been debating how big a problem it is and whether it is worth it, and whether there are workarounds or alternate solutions, and what side effects they have, and whether they are worth it.
The best web page disclaimer I ever read was something to the effect of “This page best viewed by coming to my office and looking at it on my monitor.”
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 2:02 pm
Are the font family changes going to propagate to the pages other than the home page as well? I really liked the sans-serif Trebuchet on your weblog.
Comment by Giulio Piancastelli — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 2:43 pm
Heh. The graphic designer I was working with stated that she hated MS Trebuchet “with the fire of a thousand suns”. I’ve used it in the past, I will likely use it again in the future, but I won’t be using it this time around.
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 3:28 pm
I find {font-family: “Trebuchet MS”} much nicer than {font-family: “Verdana, Arial, sans-serif”}, but not nearly as nice as {}. With {}, Giulio can choose Trebuchet in his/her font prefs, I can set Georgia in my font prefs, and we’re all happy.
Meanwhile, I’m also having Ned’s problem on IE/Mac.
Comment by mpt — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 5:43 pm
> The best web page disclaimer I ever read was something to the effect of “This page best viewed by coming to my office and looking at it on my monitor.”
“This page best viewed.”
And that’s a very nice design. I love the soft unclicked b-links link color.
Comment by Jesper — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 5:46 pm
Here’s a redesign just for Matthew:
http://diveintomark.org/public/2003/11/mpt.html
Comment by Mark — Tuesday, November 11, 2003 @ 8:33 pm