What the Fran

Too much fun with CSS

Last week I got a little crazed styling some pages and it was so much fun. I'm now sniffing around the site looking for anything else that could really do with its own theme.

It started last month when I did a green background for some pages and a sepia style for the history page. Then got fully out of hand.

I'd been wanting to have some pages styled differently for a while because I'm caught in this conflict between my inner minimalist and maximalist. I love the standard look of my site. Clean and simple, easy to read, and so on. Even in my 1999 geocities times I was pretty restrained. But I also love bright colours and bold typefaces and twiddly bits and Stuff. Design philosophy: Stuff.

A compromise, then. Stuff as and when called for thematically.

The particularly styled ones (thus far) are History and heritage, Time travel, It's the stars, and The Old Web.

On the slightly more technical side - for I am not a technical person (my phone auto complete offered me 'good person' which is extremely rude) - I put the styles I'm likely to use more than once in the main stylesheet and the really specific stuff is just on that particular page. It's just fun.

Another change is my notes page. It just sort of ended up a list of bullet points with no intent or design and I didn't like it. I rewrote it in paragraph fashion but what I really wanted was a sort of librarian's card cabinet approach. I'm trialling that on a separate page while I see how I feel about it.

It looks like this:

Link cards in different colours and sizes on my Notes page

My way of doing anything is basically trial and error. Change, preview, oh I made it worse, change, preview, okay so what actually broke it, comment something out, preview, not that so put that back and change something else by a comically large amount, preview. And so on. I know I could do this sort of thing locally or in code editors but I do not.

Things still to do:

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