Technical Documentation
For my site, I wanted to have a system that would be easy to customise and maintain from anywhere. So I spent a lot of time searching and testing a number of cmss and blog software, including Drupal, XOOPS, eZ Publish, Typo3, Mambo/Joomla!, and Wordpress. Still not convinced, I went on considering other blog software, such as Movable Type, Expression Engine, and TextPattern.
Finally, I chose WordPress since I find it a system that is flexible enough to offer both blogging and content management capabilities while being fully standards compliant and easy to customise.
This version of the site was launched on 9 February 2007 and it is hosted by Combell.
UPDATE: the new version of this site was launched in November 2009. I changed to HTML5 DOCTYPE and added some CSS3 enhancements. The site is still running on Wordpress. However, I’m now working with ExpressionEngine and MODx too, in various other web projects. These three CMSs are the best I’ve seen and I will continue using them whenever I can.
What follows is a description of some of the design solutions I used for this site.
Layout
This site was built with HTML5 and uses CSS for positioning, according to w3c recommendations. I am interested in grid systems and CSS layouts, so I used a liquid 13-column symmetrical grid (as an hommage to Mr Fibonacci). This gives me a number of layout options. By combining these columns into supercolumns, I have aligned the elements to the grid structure.
Colours
The current colour scheme used on this site is the following: #cc6, #b77, #eed, #000, #333, #999.
Typography
A while ago, I bought The Elements of Typographic Style and Thinking With Type. These books really opened my eyes. Maintaining a consistent baseline on the web is far from being easy, but I tried to achieve just this with the help of these great resources:
- Get Rhythm in Your Baseline
- How to size text using ems
- Compose to a Vertical Rhythm
- Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid
- Add and delete vertical space in measured intervals
In short, it goes like this:
- base font-size: 0.75 × 16px = 12px
- base line-height: 1.8em × 12px = 21.6px
- element font-size in ems: desired font-size in pixels ÷ parent font-size in pixels
- line-height & margin-bottom: base line-height in pixels ÷ desired font-size in pixels
This results in consistent baseline even if element font size decreases or increases. All font sizes are determined according to the traditional typographic scale (8-9-10-11-12-14-16-18-21 ect.). Now, it’s not necessary to be this strict, but with this site I wanted to see how it would look like :-)
As for the fonts, the headlines and body copy are set in Georgia. In near future, I might start using sIFR if I find a suitable typeface for headlines.
Supported browsers
I have tested this website on following browsers and platforms (if not specified, latest version):
- Firefox, Flock, Opera, IE7, IE6, IE5.5, IE5 on Windows XP
- Firefox, Flock, Camino, Opera, Safari on OSX
- Firefox on Linux
For the best possible experience, use Safari (on Mac OS X), or a Gecko-based browser, such as Firefox (on Mac OS X, Windows, or Unix). Use Internet Explorer only if you don’t have a choice. (Luckily, nowadays you do!). See Why You Should Dump Internet Explorer.
If you access this website with a browser different from those listed above (or with outdated version), you’ll still be able to see the content, but with some flaws in the layout.
Akikoo.org offers RSS feeds for content syndication. I don’t, however, think I’ll write here regularly. We’ll see — thanks for your interest though ;-).