I have been working on a redesign for Digital Backcountry for a while, and decided that posting one of the concepts might be helpful. I want to tone down the page and use a lot of grays so that I can revolve the header photo and show off some of our pictures. We go to some pretty cool places and take some decent photos, so this would be a good way to show them off. I also got a chance to use some of the new Microsoft fonts which may help with readability.

Let me know what you think, you can either comment or send me an e-mail. All suggestions would be helpful.

Here’s the main layout.
Variations on the header are here, here, and here.

For some reason my comments are broken if you’re looking at individual entry pages. We’re having guests this weekend which means I’ll be busy cleaning the apartment tonight but I’ll take a look at it when I’m finished. In the meantime, if you want to comment on something you can go over to the main page and comment from there.

If you want to comment on something in the archives then you’re out of luck sucker.

Thanks to Dan, I realized that I was inadvertently sharing my blog feed with someone else. I use HostMySite.com for my CF hosting, and Dan noticed that my RSS Feed was showing up as http://www.cronkrightinteractive.com/ but I couldn’t figure out why. After finding out that Cronkright uses CF, I figured out what the problem was.

When I set up my blog, I left the name as ‘Default’. I think Cronkright set up their blog, which also had the name ‘Default’ and because we’re on the same server, the feeds just merged.

I changed my blog name and now I think everything should work. I’m a little wiser too.

I had some great news in my e-mail box this evening after hanging out with some co-workers. I’m now being aggregated by MXNA. Between this, Becky, and Scott, my readership may increase by infinity percent. It may even increase by a real number percentage.

Now that I’m knee deep in Flex, I’m hoping to be able to post a lot about the app I’m working on and specifically the e-learning aspects behind it. Maybe I’ll even be able to politic for OTIS winning the MAX award.

It was an easy fix, I just had to set a full path in the layout file that references the stylesheets.

So the new version is pretty cool. I like the naming convention a lot more (/yyyy/mm/dd/alias-name vs 3209asjfaslkfdo2) and the rumor is that it will help with search engine optimization. Hopefully that will help me get my place back with Google who seems to have dropped me from the “Ryan Stewart Blog” search.

Who the hell do they think they are anyway! I think google hates me.

I upgraded the blog to BlogCFC version 3.8.1 but it had some unintended side effects. For some reason my css is no longer applied to the page. Hopefully I’ll have it fixed in short order, then I can enthuse about the new version.

I finally have internet at my new apartment. Hopefully I’ll find some time to update my blog software but we’ve got family coming the next couple of weeks, and I just bought NCAA 2006 so I’m not sure I will get around to it.

At least I have the net again. I was getting the shakes.

After talking a little bit with Terry today, I’m playing with the idea of redesigning the site. He has the book The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea who runs the CSS Zen Garden. Every time I look at that site I want to do a redesign because it’s the ultimate inspiration site when it comes to CSS artistry, but I also have some cool pictures that Ciara and I have taken which I’d like to show off (just like the one at the top of the page now). It’s just a matter of finding a design which is conducive to doing that.

I’m still in the very early “Photoshop” stage but I’ll post jpegs as I get closer and closer. In the end I may stick with what I have, but we’ll see how it goes.