Stories from my blogosphere

  2. Changes: a new responsive theme

    There are some big changes ahead for everything and everyone, this much-neglected blog included.

    First of all, I won’t be blogging for ZDNet any more. Theoretically, this means more time for this, my portfolio/rant site. We shall see.

    Secondly, I have started work on a new responsive blogging theme for Nesta called NestaPress. There’s nothing much in the GitHub repo as of yet, but one of the exciting parts is that I’ll be using Inkscape to create the mockups. I love Inkscape, in all its SVG vector goodness, and the file’s are all plain text too, so the goodness can be spread like a giant lump of marmite. Let’s hope you like marmite.

    Thirdly, I am branching out into the field of permaculture and sustainable living. I think this is because I’m getting older and getting bored of designing and building websites for what are essentially totally useless products (you know who you are).

    This is exciting because I am going to get to make stuff I think is useful and beautiful. I will, of course, keep my avid readers posted.

  3. Less broken

    I’ve spent the day rebooting the Memset VPS that I manage. I made the foolish novice mistake of trying to install Ruby on Rails on the server, rather than using the excellent and mostly-free-until-you-need-lots Heroku hosting.

    Which means this poor portfolio site has been ever more neglected. I’ve fixed the basic layout for the larger desktop view (go on, expand your browser, see the ugliness in full flowing action). But it needs some work.

    And then, finally, mobile layout last (I know, I know).

  4. Trouble with Rem

    In the midst of my langorous and leisurely responsive redesign, I noticed that my text sizing is all over the shop.

    Turns out the problem was in my use of rem, the relative ems in CSS3, the use of which I pinched from @Malarkey’s blog post on his responsive web design boilerplate (in the bit about the mixins). I didn’t pay attention during the appropriation, so I missed one crucial point:

    The font size is relative to the base font size. Hence the term relative ems.

    Doh. I’d set the base font size on the body to 1.1 rem. Now I’ve used @snookca’s recommendation of setting html font-size to 100%.

    Time to clear up the ensuing font mess…