February 14, 2007
I just saw this in my feed reader:
Matt Thomas:
This is a reminder that your Daring Fireball membership, including access to members-only RSS feeds such as this one, is set to expire on Saturday, March 3.
Click here to donate for another year of membership.
Thanks for supporting Daring Fireball.
—John Gruber
How cool is that? Not yet another automatically-generated email in my inbox—this was right within NetNewsWire, where it really got my attention. Needless to say, I renewed right away.
February 11, 2007
About a year ago, the previous design for iammattthomas.com really lost its appeal to me. It was at that time I began thinking about what I wanted to do with a new site: features, interface, visual style. I had many sparks but nothing ever caught fire—I never managed to come up with that one idea that motivated me to finish the job.
I’ve had a little seed germinating for a while, an idea based around a really simple layout and judicious use of typography. That’s easier said than done on the web, but I finally feel like I’ve gotten to a release-worthy point now. While still a fan of sIFR, I decided this time around to go with the best available fonts for each OS, and I’ll be tweaking that more I’m sure as I become more familiar with Vista and the various permutations of Linux. By keeping things simple I’ve made things easier on both you and me—the single CSS file is only 8 KB (and I think I can go smaller, as I start cutting away some of the chaff), and the layout worked the first time around in all modern browsers without any debugging. That’s my day job—life’s too short to spend a weekend debugging your own personal site in Internet Explorer.
My favorite little feature is a small one—the layout is elastic. For those of you who don’t know, try using your browser’s text resize to see what that does for you. While the default 800×600 friendly size is great on my laptop, when I’m staring at a big desktop display, I like to bump the whole page up a bit, and by specifying everything in ems, the page gets even more beautiful the bigger you go.
As far as influences go, I don’t know where to start. I looked to Richard Rutter’s The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web over and over throughout the process, to the point that the site occupies a prime spot on my browser’s bookmarks bar for easy reference. I found little things that worked well here and there—a comment form layout from Airbag Industries; Matt Mullenweg’s Asides technique. Shaun Inman’s trick for controlling anti-aliasing in Safari. Joe Clark’s simple, single-column presentation. A radiant pattern from a beer bottle. A thousand little things influence the design and will continue to do so, I’m sure, for as long as it’s online.
If you come across a little problem here or there, rest assured that I’m probably already obsessing over it. It’s been a long time since I designed anything for myself, so it will take a while for me to trudge through all the little details I usually get smarter people to help me with.
Up next: Turning this little ditty into a full-fledged WordPress theme. I need to teach myself the process, and a simple theme like this should make for a good sandbox to work in. When I’m done, I’ll be releasing it for free, for the masses—any helpful direction regarding a license (GPL?) is appreciated.
