A Satisfying Conclusion

Now that's a good feeling. After several weeks of intense effort to turn Biola's newest student journals design into a capable XHTML+CSS site — voilá, she is launched!

The last 4 days of development were fairly casual, partly due to the content manager being out sick, but it was great to have that extra time to polish the site up a bit with some effects courtesy of the new moo.fx javascript library. I added a formatting tips guide á la Basecamp — hey, why reinvent the wheel, right? The extra time also allowed me to ensure the site was compatible with IE Mac, for that rare person using the best operating system but crippling their experience with a dying browser. We won't discuss those limping along with an inferior OS, except to say the site is of course compatible there too. And the site validates for XHTML 1.0 Strict. Oops, just the homepage does right now. Some last minute tweaks on the journalist pages need some extra attention. Update: Everything validates now.

This week also brought with it the launch of another endeavour — the new Skit Guys homepage and navigation structure. I took the opportunity to play around with the One True Layout - a new CSS method that enables total layout flexibility, equal height columns, and more. I can't stress this enough - this is an awesome development in CSS layout creation. Instead of having to debug everything about your CSS structure, you can rest assured that the fundamental layout works in every browser. If something breaks you have a clear method to fix it: strip the site down to the basic layout and add elements until you find the proverbial wrench. Sure, that can still be time-consuming but at least you have the peace of mind that it's not the layout itself. Eric Meyer calls it a layout revolution. Yeah, now you're listening huh?

Sitting here at my desk now after letting these sites out on their own — particularly Journals which is already becoming more than the sum of its parts because of the blog-like features — I feel like I can breathe again. And stare out the window a little more often, and at the computer screen just a little bit less. If you get the chance to swing by either sites, let me know what you think. There's time now to dream again.