Shiny bits

At long last, here are the shiny bits.

I know, it is plain, but not as plain as what came before it, right?

Well, this is pretty much all the shine that is going to be around here. I’m going to move on to some feature bits. In fact, the reason getting the shiny bits out here took a little longer was due to taking a feature bit out as I didn’t feel it was quite ready yet. (Oh, and working a lot.)

Anyway, I won’t be working quite as crazily as I have been lately, so now I’ll feel up to coding a bit when I get home at a reasonable hour. Oh, and that means I can catch up on telly too. And Xbox. And comics (really!). And blogging.

You’ve heard this before. I know.

You don’t believe me. I know.

I can tell this because many have stopped dropping by as of late. I don’t blame you. Why would stop by if I’m not, right?

So, that’s that, but you demand more about the shiny bits! Well, if you are a WordPress user, you’ll think I ripped off the new admin color scheme introduced with 2.5. This is sorta true and sorta false. I’ve always used blues and grays, so you might question that splash of orange. To that, I’d say I had orange in my first and second designs, albeit just in the blog header for pages (not posts), so you may not remember. I’ve always liked blue and orange together, so I had intended to bring that back for this design, but as I worked thru it, I took away a lot of the color I had in favor of the grays and white. That said, after I saw the hue of orange in WP, I straight ripped it… and the dark gray. Thought it really set off the blue I had and that orange.

Yeah, more drop shadows here too. It is my new thing. Started it over on Poe’s site, pushed it on Ed’s and now on mine. Sorta how I got gradient happy for a little bit too. Hey… Poe has both now… anyway, I like the shadows, especially with the Polaroids for the Flickr photos. That was my favorite part about Ed’s new site, so how could I not grab that for myself, especially since the Polaroid thing originated here a couple designs ago.

As for the tabs, they are my favorite thing about this. I figured out how to do that metal-stamped lettering look in Photoshop all by myself. No Michael Scott tutorials. What’s 081? Basically, OB1 in all numeric form, but 8 is also my favorite number, so that’s serendipity. The zero and one are also synonymous with binary and I’m a coder, so another happy little coincidence. Finally, I like the general head-scratch it probably causes, not that OB1og didn’t cause that anyway, but… whatever.

Do the colors and text look too dark? Does the font suck? Well, then you are probably looking at this piece of sh!t art on a CRT and without ClearType fonts turned on. (Don’t turn them on with a CRT you might think it is teh suck.) If you have an LCD and WinXP (or Vista), then what are you waiting for, turn on that ClearType! Your eyes will thank you! If not, slap down a few bucks for an LCD… again, your eyes will thank you… as will your desk, for all that free space to clutter with paper and dust… hmm… maybe not so thankful.

Colors too washed out? Hmm… your LCD is probably too bright. You should really mess with it. If you mess it up too much, it isn’t my fault. You messed with it. (But try Reset.)

So, what do you like about this? Hate? Suggestions? Please share as a comment. I do this for a living — coding, not blogging — so I’m used to criticism and praise alike. You have to be, so no worries if you are a hater. Proclaim it for all the interwebs to hear!

Oh, I’ll announce feature bits as I put them out.