Website Updates

I've gone ahead and set out a new theme. I didn't make it (there is a link in the footer to the guys that did.) It's a nifty theme none the less, and it does a number of things I like. It also comes in blue, which I like on PseudoLife.

You may notice the light text on dark background look of the game is something I haven't done on PseudoLife... ever (2000 version of PseudoLife.) I've been doing black on white for the page because that makes things easier to read. Then I read this post by another geek who was reworking his own layout. The part that struck me was a comment about dark backgrounds being better for graphic heavy sites. This version of PseudoLife is for storing my pictures, not writing (because all the past versions were about writing things... only I never wrote anything.) To that end I've switched to a dark background.

Of course a dark background is sort of like cheating. Webpages tend to look better this way (although not so professional). In the past I had half-cheated by have a black background but putting all the text in a white rounded box/etc. I really liked that look but it made having this (new picture filled) website adjust to some large pictures incredibly tough to do well. Similarly I've setup this theme so that when looking at a picture's page, there is no right side bar. That way if you look at a very large image, it doesn't cover or fall behind anything. When browsing content (which is mostly thumbnails) the side bar includes information useful for refining content... if you one of my friends and have access to all the content. The private content is blocked, and the refining tools don't work well with the content locking tools.

Although it was done a while ago, I also added series types to a lot of my content, allowing people to look at groups of related things instead of randomly finding things by tag. I also added the block of related content recommendations to most content pages so if you like what you're looking at, you can find similar pictures.

Lastly, last night I made a whole new series of random page logos. The old ones were blue on black, these new ones are black outlined white as PNG files with alpha channels (so white on transparency). I made more of them this time. If you don't like the one you see, refresh your browser and you'll see a new one. What do you think?