DerekAllard.com

Kill All Humans revised

Well, the time has come to properly do this site. Until now I've been using a Wordpress theme that I hacked together in an afternoon and named "Kill All Humans", but it never quite felt right. There were so many little things here and there, CSS inconsistencies, etc. So what I've decided to do is rebuild my site in Code Igniter, and chronicle the whole process in short (maybe 10 minute) videos.

The first step is re-building the XHTML to be like I want it to be. Below you'll find the XHTML/CSS building blocks of the new derekallard.com.

Kill All Humans revised

Comments

Yannick wrote on

Looking forward to watching the videos Derek and I must say ever since I came upon your site, I have really liked the design. Nice, simple and clean. The header is pretty cool as well.

Derek wrote on

Thanks Yannick!  This new design took a surprising amount of hard work!

Charles Follymacher wrote on

Great looking site, Derek.  Also impressed with the functionality of the comment side bar.  It seems so obvious, but I wonder why no one else has the bar stationary on the side?  How did you set it so that it knows to stop at the banner border?

p.s. I?m so stealing this idea if i ever figure it out.
p.p.s. Curious why you didn?t use expression engine to build your site instead of rolling your own?

Derek wrote on

Sincere thanks for the kind words.  The bar uses javascript to detect how far the page has scrolled, and when it hits the same distance as the height of the header banner, the stylesheet changes so that the sidebar gets locked.  I’ll outline how I did it some day on the blog.  There are some problems - it only works in Firefox.  I’ll get around to fixing that someday ;)

If I had to do it again ExpressionEngine would be a total no-brainer.   I built it custom using pMachine’s open-source Framework, Code Igniter,  as a proof of concept.  I’m pretty active within that community.  I was going to build a series of tutorials on how I did it, just like I did for this one - http://video.derekallard.com/.  I’m not sure those will ever get released now since I’ve started to get more and more into ExpressionEngine.  I might save the video tutorials for that ;)