Fall is here. I guess. It's kind of hard to tell when the highs are still in the low 80s and work lunches are cut short because shade is scarce and it's just too hot to sit out there baking in the sun any longer. Around here it feels like the spatial weather variance outweighs the temporal — driving out to the coast some days (or north to San Francisco just about any day) can be enough to make it seem like Winter in the middle of Summer.
With Fall come new TV shows and new fashions, and really, why should websites be any different? So this weekend I pulled up a site redesign I had been tinkering with, finished up the details, and decided to commit. Because hey, frames are just so five years ago! I noticed in the process that Mac book author James Duncan Davidson changed his site design recently too, going back to something closer to the previous motif (which I can now safely concede I liked better all along). Being more of a blues and greens kind of guy than a “Fall colors” myself, I'm certainly in no position to make snide comments about whites after Labor Day. (Who am I to argue? It prints without the fuss, and it's what all the websites are wearing this year!) I hope James keeps up with the frequent photo posts, as I enjoy his camerawork as much as the Mac news and ever-changing graphic design! :-)
As for my own virtual fashion adventure: Making such sweeping changes inevitably pointed out the many flaws in the small flotilla of ad hoc held-together-with-twigs-and-bits-of-string homebrew Cocoa apps that I very generously think of as a content management system. I'm generating my blog and photo gallery pages from templates, which certainly helps, but editing the templates themselves and all the remaining pages is still a matter of manual futzing with HTML markup.
The two significant technical leaps forward I did make during this revamp were to shift toward more modern CSS usage in my pages and to start using CSSEdit in the process. CSSEdit is a very nice little Cocoa app for creating and editing stylesheet files. Sure, CSS syntax is simple and it's easy enough to write by hand. But I found it significantly more productive to move up to an environment where I can toggle at will between source-level editing (with nice syntax highlighting and auto-completion) and a visual editing UI, while previewing the effects on a sample page with a simple keystroke (Cmd+Option+P), picking colors with live visual feedback, etc. Plus, the app serves as a handy reference to CSS features and syntax that's with me even when my O'Reilly CSS Pocket Reference isn't (portable though that compact wonder may be).
The nestable groups (which are saved with the stylesheet as XML-like annotations embedded in CSS comments) make it a lot easier to keep a complex stylesheet organized, and the toolbar has an iTunes-like live search field that makes finding styles by name lightning fast. CSSEdit will even pull down the CSS for any site whose URL you give it, which is very handy for learning from other people's nice work and answering the burning question “How the heck did they do that?” And, as I only now discovered after updating my site, CSSEdit will even update the <link rel="stylesheet" … > tags in your .html files in batch.
A couple of times I ran into a situation where the extended preview window didn't seem to be picking up changes and I had to switch to previewing in Safari. (I'll have to see if I can figure out how to repro the problem and then “file a bug,” as I frequently ask others to do when it comes to the stuff I work on. :-) But on the whole CSSEdit is a very solid, polished, well thought out app — deservedly supported by a nice website, and well worth the $24.99 to register.
One thing an app like CSSEdit can't possibly provide of course (short of coming bundled with professionally designed starter templates — which, come to think of it, could be a nice future addition!) is graphical design competence. Hopefully the new design I brewed up is clear and easier to navigate. I'm trying to keep it simple so I don't get in over my head. All the same stuff is here as before, just reclassified under the new headings. All the links seem to be working, but I'll appreciate feedback about anything people find that's broken.
Welcome (back), and Enjoy!