i.never.nu 10.0

I’m not 100% sure, I’d have to look through archived files but I believe this new look is the 10th design of i.never.nu. Not bad for a seven and a half year history. With this new theme I’m going kind of halfway to the art directed blog posts trend. Proponents of that trend art direct each post, just like each article has it’s own look in many magazine. I love the idea but I post too much stuff to do that and, well, I’m not a designer. What I will do though is to regularly change the background image and some of the colors and spacing. When I find images that I like I post them on Céboça and some of those I’ll single out and build a “theme” around.

To accomplish that pretty easily, I wrote a few lines of PHP code which do the following:

1. Check which week we’re in, look for a css file with that week in the name (in a certain directory on my server).
2. If it exists, load it.
3. If not, determine the month and do the same search.
4. If it exists, load it.

When neither exist, the design is all black and white.

In those files I define the background image, the colors for the description on the left and for the meta post information on the right as well as play around with the spacing to properly frame something in the background image. There’s also a PHP file of the same name which contains credits for the picture, with a link. That file gets included in the template and shows up at the top right. There isn’t one now because it’s a picture I took so I didn’t feel I needed to add the credit.

Right now the whole site uses the same style but in the next few hours I’ll add to the code so that on single post pages, the week or month used will be the one the post was written on. That way, unless I completely redo the site at some point in the future, posts will retain a bit of their timely context with the styling that was on the site when they were published.

Other than those changes, I also need to test on other browsers. Currently it works in Safari and Firefox, at some point I’ll do a check on IE8-9 and Firefox Windows (very few chances that there will be bugs there since it works on FF Mac).

Thoughts? Comments?

[Update later the same day] Concerning the time context of posts, this post from two weeks ago for example uses a style matched to the 27th week of 2010 and that post will use the style of that week, whatever the look on the frontpage.