Overview

Features

  • Displays properly and similarly in all major browsers.
  • Wordpress widget-friendly
  • Includes a print-specific stylesheet for hardcopy usage (select “Print Preview” from your browser to see the results)
  • Well-documented CSS and other files.
  • Image-less design with fluid layout to adjust to user’s browser sizing and provide wide accessibility. Looks tolerable at 800 pixels wide!
  • em-based sizing with base font left at the browser’s default (most commonly 16px). Think the font is too big? I disagree, but you can adjust your browser and it should scale fine.
  • Based on Sandbox, a very flexible framework of sorts that allows for almost limitless yet simple CSS styling.

Styling Decisions and Rationale

  • The 100% Easy to Read Standard is adhered to on purpose. I am in full agreement with its ideas and reasoning.
  • Content is king. Metadata, such as when the post was made, who made the post, and what categories it was posted under are second-class pieces of information and should be easily found if looked for, but should not detract from the content. As such, I have styled the metadata a little inconspicuosly and grouped it together at the bottom right of each post. There’s no reason for the date to be at the top of each post. This isn’t grade school homework we’re writing.
  • The tired old ‘Categories’ list in the sidebar has been commented out. It’s my belief that this is a very very seldom used item by actual users. The same exact list of categories can be drilled into via the Archives. Again, the focus is on the written body content.

Deviations from Sandbox 1.3 PHP Code

You probable don’t need to read this if you don’t know what this section heading even means.

The basic “core” CSS, PHP, and HTML that comes with Sandbox needed a bit of tweaking as far as I was concerned. Here’s is what I have changed.

  1. index.php : Removed DIV for nav-above but left DIV for nav-below. I just did not see any reason to clutter the very top of the front post listing with navigation forward and backward through sets of N posts. The bottom works just fine.
  2. functions.php : Added code in sandbox_globalnav() to always include a first navigation item (menu item really) that directs users HOME.
  3. single.php : Since I have styled single post display so that the sidebar disappears and the main content area is larger, I added a notice message for this in this file. Styling can be done in style.css as div#singlepost-warning. This full page view is nice for flipping through posts like pages of a book.
  4. many files : I moved the DIV for entry-date to just above the DIV for entry-meta, as mentioned above in the section on Styling Rationale.
  5. archives.php : Added ‘by author’ section to the archives and removed the word ‘Archives’ from in front of every section. It’s the archives page, we know they’re “Archives By Category” — so now it’s just “By Category” with a typical page title stating “Archives.”
  6. archive.php : Reworded things to sound less robotic/programmatic. No more “Monthly Archives: March 2008″. Instead the title of the page reads “Archives for March 2008″