AUTHOR OF ARCHENEMIES AND PERCIVAL GYNT AND THE CONSPIRACY OF DAYS

Responsivating the Website

In advance of book launch, I figured it was a good idea to beat this website with a CSS stick until it met responsive design standards (i.e. so it doesn't look stupid on your phone). Took me a few days, but I think it's basically where I want it.

Some hiccups along the way.

  • At some point over the last few months, the save functionality on several of my CMS pages just... died. (One of the pitfalls of using 10+ year old blogging software.) Thankfully there was an option to manually create and maintain standalone HTML template files outside of the CMS and them link them in via SQL. I'm good for now, although there was a nerve-wracking few hours where I thought I was going to have to rebuild everything from scratch on another platform.
  • Replaced all the tables with DIVs and set images to resize, because this is not 2004. Still convinced that animated gif hands reaching out of mailboxes will make a comeback.
  • Spent a lot of time parsing through nested elements trying to figure out which one was creating an extra, unwanted default margin. (CORRECT ANSWER: All of them.)
  • Standardized form styling across browsers, which mostly means "Told Safari to stop being a jerk."
  • Centering content on the page was creating little "jumps" every time I switched from scrolling to non-scrolling pages. Fixed this for 95% or so of the potential use cases.

Per usual, that's 95% of the time spent on things 95% of you won't notice, but that means 5% of you should be extremely gratified by my commitment to excellence.

Now back to the book.