Plumbers tap

It’s not a new expression but it goes a long way to describe the lack of design attention apparent on this site. Tonight I am making some superficial changes (i.e. CSS only) to ollicle.com.

The usual excuses have held me back from digging in and making some solid decisions that will get the design of this site into decent fom.

• I spend all day doing this stuff – do I really want to do more in my free time?
• Still don’t have a PC at home – so I can’t test my CSS in Internet Exploder
• One monitor is not enough
• Should wait for Movable Type 3 – I may want to rethink my templates to take advantage of new functionality.
• Maybe I should consider alternative blogging tool - Expression Engine looks tantalising
• Not to mention the self imposed list of stuff I ‘should’ be doing!

The main reason I expect is the default templates says loud and clear “I have not even tried!”. Thereby escaping any judgements my imaginary peers may have to offer. When I do it I want to do it damn well.

Not having time to meet my own unrealistic expectations I’m going to make small changes from once in a while. With some luck this will take the pressure off the valve and some improvements can start flowing.

So tonight I have cracked open the CSS file and made some changes that make this site look a little more like a Photoshop mock-up I put together months ago.

This was also to be the debut of Textile 2.0. on this site. Thanks Brad and Dean – it looks great!

I look forward to being able to remember everything it can do. Textile is great for someone like me. I know my html but I’m slow when it comes to typing tags. Unfortunately tonight I’m getting some sort of error with version 2 when I attempt to build the page:

Can’t locate Encode.pm in @INC

Another investigation to add to the to do list.

Further thoughts

Textile Update

That’s the message — update!

Version 2.0.1 of Textile fixes the error I was experiencing. I’ve given all the formatting rules that I’m likely to use a spin and they all work with one exception – ‘pre’. The < and > of the contained tags were not encoded as promised.

Fortunately ‘bc’ seems to work and appears to be a better solution for displaying code on these pages anyway. As does @…@ for creating <code> tags.

Since converted to Markdown.