Posted on: January 20th, 2010 by Famous Phil

Hi, and welcome to the new FamousPhil website!  It isn’t actually all that new, but it is a major revision of my website.  This has been coming now for at least the past 5 months because I completely hated the colors that I chose for the overall site theme.  I can’t believe that I thought mixing all sorts of colors would even remotely look good. Anyways, I fixed it and I feel that the site looks better.

So what exactly changed?

I changed the color scheme a little bit and this is what you will likely notice the quickest.  I decided to go with a traditional blue theme using the same blue that I selected before, but this time with a color guide.  For anyone in need of finding colors that go well together, I strongly recommend: http://colorschemedesigner.com/.  That site helped me a lot!

In addition, FamousPhil now validates to XHTML Strict 1.0, it used to validate to XHTML Transitional 1.0.  This is basically technical language saying that FamousPhil is guaranteed to look the same on all compliant browsers that can display this website.  This was very difficult to achieve considering the old website base uses many elements of XHTML transitional that don’t exist in strict.  Regardless of the difficulty, I managed to get everything updated and working well   You may ask why I didn’t choose HTML 5 (I know one person who did), and my reasoning is, its standards aren’t fully established yet and aren’t mainstream enough for my personal preferences.

Finally, the major component that I really wanted to fix for a long time has happened.  On my end, FamousPhil now has a real content management system.  I wrote a theme for Wordpress (thanks to John) and I now use Wordpress as my content management system.  Doing this has made my life much easier since changing the site has gone from manually editing source code to “drag and drop”.  Hopefully I can continue to make my sites easier to manage so I can perhaps find more free time in the future

Thats all for now.  I still need to do some blogging on some important issues, but that will come someday in the near future

Tags: color scheme, design, famousphil, validation, xhtml
Posted in My Site
|| 1 Comment »

Posted on: May 20th, 2009 by Famous Phil

After a lot of pressure, not only from Jordan but mostly everyone, FamousPhil.com now has a new, shiny look!  *at least for the most part*.  Sure, I could improve the navigation buttons a bit to make them look “web 2.0,” but that will come in another project down the road after I finish up the rest of this never ending to do list.

As you’ve probably noticed, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been very tight with my blog releases after posting almost every day for one stretch there.  The truth of the matter is, when I get highly involved in a site redesign, I like to spend all of my time and effort working on that redesign and forgetting about everything else.   I do admit that its tough for me to get into working on a website design in the first place, but once I’m in the process of working, I generally do not like being distracted.

For me, a distraction of any kind, even that 1 second hi to a friend passing by can throw my mind off by a huge amount.  To me, distractions can end up costing me a few hours (sometimes an entire day) to get my thoughts back and continue working on the problem I was focusing on at the time of the distraction.  Sure, this is annoying, but I’ve learned how to slam the door and tell people not to disturb me at all unless the world is on fire when I begin such projects.  Its just the way that I work I suppose.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: chrome, css, design, div, firefox, internet explorer, position, positioning, problems, relative, safari, table, validation, web 2.0, website, xhtml
Posted in My Site
|| 1 Comment »