In the vineyard

· redesign · Web dev ·
Jan 20, 2004 by Aleksandar Vacić 2 minute read

Welcome to my vineyard.

After months of work, starting and abandoning various designs, I settled with the theme inspired with my family’s vineyard. Colour theme reflects the winter look of the vineyard and I hope I’ll be able to reflect other seasons as well.

There is not much new in the overall data structure of the site. New addition is the list of latest comments - now I will have no excuse for not answering the questions in time.

how I wanted it to be

It’s not how I wanted it to be though. My wish was to have only one column, and complete right column to be placed in the upper part of the site. When you hover the icon, appropriate section would appear. Along with that, I wanted to preserve the structural layout. As usuall, browser bugs and incomplete support came in the way.

Idea was rather simple…

    #cp {
    	background: #eae8d0 url( images/boxes_cp.gif ) no-repeat right top;
    	padding: 29px 0 0 0;
    	width: 29px;
    	height: 29px;
    	he\ight: 0;
    	position: absolute;
    	left: -40px;
    	top: 8px;
    	overflow: hidden;
    }
    #cp:hover {
    	padding: .3em;
    	border: 1px solid #630;
    	width: 200px;
    	height: auto;
    }

In essence: relatively position side column, then use absolute position for all blocks in it. Content would appear on mouse over and all the horizontal space would be available for entries.

But no joy; of all the CSS2 wannabes, only Firebird 0.7 and Safari 1.1 worked as I wanted. Netscape 7.1, Opera 7.23, IE 5.2 Mac…they all use viewport’s top-left corner as (0,0) instead of right column’s so none of the boxes was visible.

And that was entirely unacceptable, since the content would not be accessible. So I left only control panel to work that way (the code above) - users of modern browsers will have added functionality to change the text size and in the future to change the site style.

Now I can focus more on writing…it’s amazing how one have most writing ideas when there is nothing to write on. Luckily, MT has Draft status, so I can start publishing those in the following days…

I also need to find out why Safari 1.1 ignores large part of the style sheet. At least it does on my iBook…