The Launch "2004 Remix" part 2
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Updated Exterior
The "outer space" theme that has been on my mind for the past couple months didn't yield any inspiration for a weblog design. So I did the next best thing: go through my old designs. I didn't have to dig any further than my last serious design. It was my best design, but far from perfect. The regions of the page were not defined well and I don't exploit contrast as much as I should have. (I developed sensitivity to both of those while working on the Early Childhood Mathematics website).
In this new version of the design, I added a faint line down the center to be the "backbone" of the page. All the other elements (except the banner), branch off of it. It gives the page the feeling of structure. No elements are "floating"; all are securely grounded. The backbone also serves to lead the eye from the top of the page to the bottom. It's especially important for the navigation because it is easily lost behind the boldness of the banner.
Other changes include the top border on the side titles (top border darker than the bottom border), a larger range of text colors (from #000 to #aaa), tweaked banner, and shadows down the sides.
Under the Hood
Entries are stored by the month (2003.12.xml, 2004.1.xml); spotlights and article links are stored in separate files (spotlight.xml, articles.xml). These files are merged by an XSLT stylesheet into a root file (root.xml). XSLT stylesheets corresponding to each entry and archive page then transform the root file into respective XHTML files.
To carry out the transformations, I'm using the transformation API of Xalan-J in a simple Java program.