I've never really been pleased with the design of the Dork Dimension. The first design was amateurish (at best) and the second didn't really mesh with the theme I was trying to set up. So, I took yet another whack at a redesign, and here it is! I rejected the previous metallic theme in favor of this hyperspace one, which is more in-line with the intergalactic flavor I would like the site to have. I hope you like it! I haven't determined yet whether or not the backgrounds of the content and sidebar make the text too hard to read. I'll have to sleep on it.
If you'd like to check out Dork Dimension designs from yesterday, click here. Man, that first one is kind of embarrassing.
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Spatial Anomalies
Label Nebula
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Bandai
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Wormhole to Other Dimensions
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2013 Designer Toy Awards17 hours ago
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Where have I been?3 days ago
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GLYOS ARMORVOR BIO INFECTION3 days ago
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Interdimensional Overlord
- Nathan Newell
- Web dork, action figure dork, video game dork... all around dork. Author of, appropriately enough, The Dork Dimension. If you'd like to contact me, my hailing frequencies are open.
The Dork Dimension is copyright 2012 by Nathan Newell. This site is not an official site for any of the licenses featured here. All items reviewed were purchased by Nathan Newell unless otherwise noted.
9 comments:
I admittedly find the overlapping panels (mainly where they cause the edge of the text areas to change) to be kind of distracting. I'd prefer a plain blue box there -- I mean, you want the lines light enough that they might as well be there at all (so they don't interfere with the reading, right?)... so they might as well not be there at all.
Also, for some reason, the "Read On" links are appearing at the ends of articles for me, which means that there's nothing to read on when I click them. Weird!
Anyway, this layout is cool, though admittedly I didn't dislike the others in the least. I actually quite like the spooky header graphic of your original design (especially because of the Garbage Pail Kids card). :)
That's all I needed to hear! I agree that it was a bit too distracting. Although I think it was a really cool idea, it just didn't pan out. I switched back the watermark graphics that I had before.
Your problem with the Read On links might be because you may have Javascript turned off on your browser. If you enable Javascript, you should see a preview of the content on the home page (basically the first paragraph) and when you click on it, it will show the rest of the content. If you still have trouble with it, just let me know!
It does look like the Javascript issue was the problem... but now I've got to ask why you'd do that with Javascript! :) I mean, limiting the text to a paragraph or two serves to keep the content pages from getting too cluttered from a visual standpoint, but it also (in theory) helps to keep load times down where lots of images (as in reviews) are concerned because the full articles aren't loading. With the Javascript method, all of that stuff still *loads*... it's just covered up.
Blogger does have a more "normal" way of achieving the cut effect, right? I don't remember encountering the issue here before, but I always browse with NoScript on. Hrm.
Anyway, I like the watermark graphics thing, though you may want to throw a repeat in there so they keep going the length of the block. :)
Unfortunately, I haven't found any way to have a preview other than to use Javascript. Blogger is pretty limited in its functionality. Although it's totally free and you can significantly change its functionality through hacks, there are definite limitations.
I know it still loads everything, though, which is a big problem. I don't know of any way around it... yet. I've been playing around with the site's RSS feed to see if there's any way to display a preview that way. Or, maybe a way to display a NOSCRIPT view for those who have Javascript turned off.
Hmm, you're right. I was going to say that I've visited Blogspot pages (which I assume use Blogger too) that display properly despite my NoScript usage -- and I have -- but a quick look at their source code reveals that apparently they've been loading everything too. The weird thing is that those pages still display properly even after I've removed all permissions (I guess Blogger and Blogspot would be the relevant ones). They do appear to have lines of code that don't show up in your source, though, so I wonder if that has something to do with it.
Not a fan of WordPress, eh? :)
Ah, I know what they're doing. They're using a SPAN to hide the content on the home page. So, they wrap the content they want to hide in a SPAN with the attribute display: none. If you click through to read the full page, the SPAN with the content is changed to display: inline.
I used to do that here, but it's kind of a pain because you have to put span class="fullpost"..../span in every post manually. It's much easier with Javascript because it hides it automatically. I didn't even think about those with JS turned off, though. Hm... maybe I'll think about that SPAN idea again.
And I like WordPress, but it seems like they want to charge you money every time you try to do a customization. I'm trying to keep this blog as cheap as possible. :)
I see -- that would explain why I remembered it being different over here. Span trickery is always fun. :)
And I was confused for a second (I've never had to pay anything for WordPress), but I see what you mean -- I'm talking about the software, not the site. :) The software's free, but one would need a webhost with the appropriate specs to use it. That can be cheap (my hosting plan's fairly inexpensive), but I don't know of too many free hosts that offer the control necessary to run WordPress.
Apparently, Google was reading these comments because they've now implemented Jump Breaks. I've put the jump breaks in all the posts (at least, for the past year) and it seems to be working well. The jump breaks are better than the Javascript because not only do they work for users who have Javascript turned off, they also don't load the entirety of each post. So, the site should load a lot more quickly!
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