Surprise, surprise - A 180 turn!

Welcome to the new Slevi, for those of you which have dropped by before you’ll probably notice a huge change whereas to the people which are new unfortunately there’s not much to compare with for you guys but believe me when I say the difference is huge. Having come from the green with a little touch [...]

Welcome to the new Slevi, for those of you which have dropped by before you’ll probably notice a huge change whereas to the people which are new unfortunately there’s not much to compare with for you guys but believe me when I say the difference is huge.

Having come from the green with a little touch of pink towards this darker theme was a big step and pretty much going from one side to the other… could probably say extreme here I guess. I aimed to go for something a little more personal this time and let myself be less influenced by as to what would be the ongoing standard at that time.

Design aimed at the future

As far as it comes to the ongoing standard is far to be found from here I’d say and as for the little personal touch that definitely worked out well. From now on I will be making my studies in medicine and my hobbies of drawing, playing around with Photoshop and every now and then doing some 3d modeling part of the new Slevi and that’s something which I tried to work out the design for.

Having combined the things what quite a few people relate to a study in medicine; namely blood, “corpse digging” and death together with my interest for drawing and Photoshop I eventually came up with the design you’re looking at right now.

That’s a major change on itself already compared to before, the previous design just as the entries weren’t really aimed at much more than simply being a little personal blog. Over time though the visitors have steadily kept increasing and I started to feel like doing something more with it, and more is definitely coming along in this new Slevi.

Art, medlies, what’s going on here?

Part of the new Slevi are going to be two subsections of the blog which might take some time to fill in but definitely will be used in the near future. What exactly you can expect from it is something which is going to become quite clear with time.

• For the art section one thing will be clear though and that’s that I’ll be selecting my own work as I practice with drawing, Photoshop or 3D modeling. It’s going to be a good way for myself to keep up with it and also get some critics on my work so I can improve.
• The medlies section will function both as a way for myself to catch up with what I have already covered in my studies and as a source of information for visitors, how this is going to look like you’ll see soon enough so be sure to check back.

What can be expected

Now this is of course always something you can wonder about for ages, I know what will be coming from my side which is a controllable factor but the input from outside is always to remain a guess, making true predictions hard to make.

From my side though you can be certain that even if the personal touch will not die you will be seeing a lot more stuff related to medical science, drawing, Photoshop and some 3d modeling. Soon you will slowly start more and more of this material showing up, in the past there have been some entries related to these categories but they tended to be rushed and had a low informative value. From now on I will aim at no longer simply writing for myself but also thinking about my possible audience and see what could be both fun for me and entertaining for you guys.

Techie roundup!

It has been quite a pain in the butt to get this design together, at first I was aiming to use CSS solely but I simply couldn’t go without JavaScript in the end. Certain features just were (still) not available with the CSS which is supported by the common browsers at this very moment.

Having decided to go for a multi-column layout again was mainly what caused some issues, although due to having run into most of the problems once before with the previous design it did ease it up though.

Eventually I have tested the design in 3 major browsers to make sure it would go well at launch.

• Firefox: This has been my main browser of testing in the initial stages; although a lot after that still happened when it comes to reducing the amount of images used, layout, etcetera it wasn’t much more than basically simplifying and working downwards. This all offered hardly any complications with Firefox, I suppose since I’ve ran into pretty much every problem it could give me in the past I worked around those by default.
• Internet explorer 7: Once I began simplifying the design I started to make sure it worked alright in Internet explorer 7 as well, after all this is probably going to remain the most commonly used browser by many to visit my blog so it better work right? And it did, what somewhat surprised me is that it looked even better than it did in Firefox. Clear type rendered the text like I wanted to see it and alignments were handled better than I initially told it to do basically through CSS.
• Opera: This one came last and as expected there wasn’t a single issue going on, the site directly displayed as I wanted it to. It wasn’t a surprise though, usually if a design works well in internet explorer and an alternative browser it tends to work in pretty much every browser except some pre-historical ones.

I haven’t tested internet explorer 6 for this design, with the previous design of Slevi I became so tired of making it compatible to that browser I just wasn’t planning to ever go through that effort again. For that matter I don’t even have internet explorer 6 installed anymore, so if it looks absolutely horrible with internet explorer 6 the only thing I’ll recommend you is do the entire web a favor and run windows update in order to obtain internet explorer 7.

1024×768 not used as your page width?

For the people with a good eye when it comes to recognizing about how much pixels something uses or for those which simply check; no, I haven’t used 1024 as the desired page width for this new theme. With currently around 30% and still rising of all resolutions used to browse the web being over 1024 pixels in width it is redundant to design a long term theme which would not be aimed at a higher resolution.

Not to worry though for those using 1024×768 though as their screen resolution, the theme checks if you’re in that resolution and adjusts the page so the sides would drop off. No annoying horizontal scrollbars will be seen.

With Javascript being required for this though and a couple of other factors the design isn’t optimal without, but it doesn’t fall apart for those which do not have Javascript enabled. Especially in IE7 there is not much of a difference since it is one of the best browsers these days when it comes to handling layers.

Thanks for reading!

I bet that even this introduction message is already my biggest entry on Slevi so far, I promise I won’t make the rest too big but having a majority of 2~3 paragraph entries will probably be a thing of the past. Anyways, let’s call it a day for now, I was planning on writing something about the plugins used as well but I’ll leave that for another time.

Enjoy your time here and I hope to see you back in the future. Don’t be shy and drop a comment, it’s always nice to hear from your readers.