Darice de Cuba

Yesterday finally inspiration hit me and in four hours I photoshopped and coded a new design for this website. I was messing already a month ago with a new design but I always want too much and to complicated. Then I thought keep graphics to a minimum, keep it simple.

So I did what usually delivers my best design, I started from a photo. I used the sky color for the background, and other hues of blue for the text. Then I tried a contrasting color, I wanted green first but wasn’t real happy with it and then I decided why not yellow. You don’t see a lot of yellow on websites.

For the bold text I went with Courier New, because it is the same font the text of my tattoo is in. And Helvetica for the smaller text. Because Helvetica is cool. And white was just the logical color to go with.

Considering I was keeping graphics at a minimum I still wanted some nice effects, enter CSS3. Here is where CSS3.info came in handy. I know IE7 and lesser don’t support it but I don’t even care for IE6 in connection with my personal website, I leave that headache for work. And people who have IE7 are way more likely to upgrade to IE8.

For the Twitter status and Flickr preview I’m using Garrett Murray’s js_twitter_flickr. He also uses some CSS3 selectors like text-overflow: ellipsis;

Hopefully now with IE8 being released the likes of Dan Cederholm, Andy Budd and Eric Meyer will release books fully dedicated to CSS3. That’s is if they haven’t already, I have to check Amazon for the latest. Meanwhile I’m anciously waiting for A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web to be delivered.

But summing up, after a year and 4 months I have a fresh new design, in my favorite color blue. The Wordpress template is clean and validates. Which I couldn’t say of the previous template.

Vacation is over and I have been back at work since this week. Vacation went by too fast, my mom was here for a month which felt more like a week. December has been very but very cold, which made going to the city more of a chore then shopping fun. But it was nice having my mother here for the holidays and someone to taste my cooking

This week also marks my one year working. Last year January 14 I started and worked the whole year without vacations till last month. It’s not always easy but I manage to keep a good balance between work and medical life. I decided to try save money for a Macbook, considering my Mac mini from 2006 is not meeting my needs anymore. My VPN won’t work which keeps me from doing extra work at home when the office is closed.

I’m also hoping to go to Aruba around June/July for 2 weeks as I haven’t been home in more than two years. If my health allows it I’ll do my best to go, because I have been having some serious home sickness again lately. And the extreme cold isn’t helping me much.

Last year I ordered “Everything you know about CSS is wrong!” and I haven’t read past the first two pages. I have been so busy with doing anything but website work. I read the whole “Twilight” series, all four books in one week. Now that I’m back in the CSS/XHTML routine I’ll do my best to read the book and move on on getting ready for HTML 5. The next website I code is going to be hardcore semantic!