Look at the new look

• • 15 Comments

After six years, I've decided to try out a new look for Airminded by switching to the Elemin theme. There's still a bit more tweaking to be done before I decide whether it will stay or not, but I think it's a pretty clean and minimalist style. It's also 'responsive', which means it reformats gracefully to suit the screen size, which is especially important for smartphones and tablets. Feedback welcome!

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15 thoughts on “Look at the new look”

  2. Post author

    No, I have no looming writing deadlines and anyway I resent the implication that I would ever use this blog for procrastination. Now, if you'll excuse me I have a presentation to prepare and… hmmm, looks like there's a missing tag in that sidebar widget, I'd better just fix that…

  3. Chris Williams

    Lovely font, Brett. I'm getting the personal gifs next to comments overwriting the first two lines of the comment. On the other hand, I am using IE8, so I probably deserve this.

  6.

    I'm finding the 'X comments' text beside the front page posts a bit difficult to read; the numbers seem very indistinct with the small font size.

    Using IE8 and not getting any overwriting by gifs.

  7.  Post author

    Thanks for the comments, seems to be generally well-received. Anyway I've decided I like it so I'm keeping it :)

    Chris:

    You use IE8? I'm so sorry… I had no idea. At least I can try to alleviate the pain. What OS are you on?

    Rik:

    I agree, it was a bit on the tiny size! I've increased the font size a little, how is that?

  10.  Post author

    I think the main problem is that this theme relies heavily on HTML5 for its pretty, and IE8 does not support HTML5; IE9 introduced HTML5 support. Unfortunately there are still a lot of people using IE8 (on this site, 12% of visitors in the last 72 hours), not surprisingly since it's the latest IE version that will run on Windows XP. That's not good. I could tell you guys to stop using IE8 and use anything else instead (Chrome, Firefox, even Safari), because friends don't let friends use IE, right? But that's not always possible, and it doesn't help with the random users who swing by using IE8.

    So I'd like to try and improve the way the site looks in IE8. I've switched off some superfluous plugins and that might help by getting rid of extraneous CSS, and there may be some other things I can do, such as trying different fonts. But I will probably have to go to the theme maintainers for support, which is awkward because I can't reproduce this problem of the gravatar overlapping the comment text even in IE8 (I can verify that it looks pretty blah in general though). So can I ask a favour: can anyone who does have that problem tell me the exact IE8 version they are using, and the operating system (eg WinXP SP3), and if you feel like it shoot me a screenshot?

    Thanks!

  12.  Post author

    Interesting. Judging from the logs, the comment you just posted was from IE9 in Compatibility View, that is to say it is emulating IE7. If so that would explain why it looks so awful! It could be that you enabled it for the old site at some point and so that preference needs to be changed. I don't have IE9 handy to test this, but it looks like you can see if Compatibility View is on by the clicking on the blue broken page icon in the address bar (if it is there), that will toggle it. Or you could hit F12 which should bring up a list of sites for which Compatibility View is enabled and remove airminded.org, if it is there.

  15.  Post author

    Well, that's one mystery cleared up, at least!

    I've been tweaking things a little, and hopefully the end result is that the site looks better for IE users. One thing I did was to change the font used for headings, which looked beautiful in anything-but-IE but dreadful in IE (or perhaps it wasn't installed on the machine I tested it on). Also, I've removed a plugin which generated the identicons (the geometric icons for commenters who don't have a gravatar), because at some point this functionality was built into WordPress itself. That might fix the problem with the icons overlapping the comments in IE, but I haven't had a chance to check it yet. There's a similar problem on the downloads page, though the cause there is probably different as it doesn't only happen in IE. That might be one for the developers.

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