After going nearly 5 years with only a minor visual refresh it was time to give ChunkySoup.net a new look. So after sacrificing a bit of spare time here and lost sleep there I’m happy to announce the launch of ChunkySoup.net version 3.0.
The design is intended to be simple. The site is about words and like the last design I didn’t want technical theatrics to get in their way. I did, however, mix things up just a bit with a right aligned layout that uses some built in flexibility along with background images to hit a balance between filling a screen and line length related readability.
Under the hood there are a few feature tweaks, including hCard and hAtom usage, along with a few server side tweaks that only I’ll ever know about. Additionally, I’m using this update as an opportunity to try Dean Edward’s IE7 library in a live environment to compensate for IE6’s lack of support for min-width, max-width and some selectors.
I also took the opportunity to label some of the old content as such. Some of it was getting rather stale and I’d hate to think people read stories such as Your CSS Bores Me without realizing it was written four and a half years ago (though some things never change).
The layout isn’t all that complex, but for its subtlety it does work fairly hard and I hope the effort resulted in something that can deal with a wide variety of screen resolutions and browser widths. The right column is a fixed width to keep the line lengths in check. The left column will vary slightly from a min width of 145px to a max width of 205px depending on the browser width and the repeating background image is used to break up the dead space at larger widths.
Layout at 764px wide
Layout at 900px wide
Layout at 1280px wide
Screenshots generated with Paparazzi!
I’ve mentioned microformats here a few times in the past, but its been hard to keep up with the pace of development and find something both useful and stable to deploy. ChunkySoup.net version 3.0 laced both hCard and hAtom on each page of the site. To extract the contact information embedded via hCard run any page on the site through X2V—just like this. hAtom is a bit shakier with the tools still coming together, but you can run each page through the hatom2atom proxy to get an almost complete Atom feed.
So please, exit your feed reader, poke around the site a bit and then let me know what you think.
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