Everyone, please welcome Freya, previously designated 4, the new glazing on top of the bittersweet pudding that is, Binary Bonsai. There are many things to say, many things to apologize for. Feel free to leave some comments while I run her through the necessary trials to see if she is ready for the world. Though keep in mind that I will come back, hopefully later tonight, to write a full super-size entry on all the thoughts I’ve had or not had and why things are in new places and in many cases in their old habitual place.
Needless to say, the minor incident this morning set me back a trifle; while I quickly covered the major rewrites, minor changes are still lingering in the recesses beyond the frontpage.
Though for what it’s worth, I’m quite happy with how it turned out, though I regret not having had the time to flesh out some of the details that I have planned. But I could feel that I had to activate it today or slowly get bogged down in the repetitious routines of adjustments ad nausea.
Now I will leave you to it, while I head off to clean up the code a little and patch whatever holes I might find.
Update: Freya Upgrade Continued
HOLY FREAKIN’ COW!
Sexy thing that is! Nice color scheme. great. Love it. Keep the goodies comin’!
Weeeeeee! Live comment preview!
Lookin’ lovely, Michael. Congrats on getting 4reyda up and running at last. :)
Wow! I really dig the new colour scheme and the immediate post preview! All those repetitive browser refreshes were worth it. Congratulations to you Michael and all the best.
Congratulations Mike. Certainly worth the wait. I love the attention to detail.
Looks great Michael, congratulations on a good job!
Wow. wow. wow.
How do you do it? How long did this take? It’s amazing.
Where did you get the picture? It’s awesome. I just picked up 2 books of copyright free line art from long ago. But that one is just awesome. I am reaaaaally wowed. I guess I’ll stop using Newsfire and just go here to read the site, and I thought Newsfire looked great.
Holy cow! pt.2
just came back to check the first responses… The cookie-integration is nice… “Welcome back Pascal”
The more i look at it, the more i like it!
Yeah, looking good.
You’ve done it again Michael! As always a pleasure to visit your website. The new style feels fresh and I hope you will continue to water the Bonsai. Shortly – I’m thrilled.
Regards Johan
Beautiful. I love it!
That’s what you miss when you use a feed aggregator! ;)
nice one…looking fresh and tasty.
Lovely, Michael.
Ooh! I think I’ve seen her before!
(The live comment preview is sort of redundant you know, since I can already what I am writing in this text entry field…)
I like the showUtils() hideUtils() for the comments. In fact, I love it. Where did you whip that up from? Awesome, simple and elegant. No clicking through to the post-a-comment page…
Carthik, that’d be true, if it wasn’t for the fact that the live preview actually understands Textile markup and of course XHTML as well…
The disappearing, reappearing JS code I nicked off of some site a few years back. Used it on the very first Binary Bonsai design as a matter of fact…
Ooooo, its so nice.
I cant wait to work on my site soon!
I like the comment “You said” hack as well…
Very Cool!
Congrats on the new design Michael, it looks great! I really like the colour scheme and I love the fact that your using Century Gothic for headers. Great work!
Looks awesome. The Live comment preview seems to be a bit buggy.
It shows me half the text and sometimes nothing at all.
Using Firefox 1.0
Very nice job with the re-design, different with just the right amount of familiarity to keep yoru brand established. And I have to say daring use of pink, not many can pull off the use of pink in a color pallete, I should know I have tried.
Again, good job. Looks like I should get back to my re-design now, huh?
Very nice :) Bold choice of colours, but seems like you pulled it off nicely.
The “Welcome back” thingy makes commenting seem even easier than before. Thats something I (and possibly many others) will implent on my site :)
Wow, mister. The colour scheme is crisp, the navigation is cool and Freya’s back. Hooray! You done good, Michael, you done good.
Pro: lovely colour scheme.
Con: Lucida Sans Unicode looks better on PCs than rare Lucida Grande.
Menu tabs are shifted down by increased text size.
Beautiful!
I love the color scheme, and the newfound simplicity.
I especially enjoy the details, subtleties, well designed text, a sidebar that doesn’t look like a traditional sidebar, and especially how the overall experience is just plainly, nicely usable.
For now I’ll get a sense of it, and offer better comments on your longer write up.
Wow! Looks amazing Michael.
The main sections on the top …. are they suppose to be tabs or buttons? If tabs, they don’t align entirely with the line on FF 1.0. I’ll send a screenshot in case you need it.
Looks really nice – once again, well done!
Has anyone else noticed the problem that Bjørn is having with the header (img)? I have tested it here with Firefox 1.0 on OS X, and it looks fine to me.
Sorry to buck the trend here Michael – but I’m afraid I don’t like it. The colours just don’t work for me at all. After the elegance of Kubrick, Freya looks (IMHO) garish and, dare I say it, feminine.
I immediately noticed the apparent lack of “visited” style for links – sorry, but this is a real show-stopper for me.
However, everyone else seems to like it, so I guess the design works for the majority.
My comments sound harsh I know, and for that I apologise. Obviously colour and design appreciation are totally subjective. It may grow on me.
Now that that’s out of the way – I have to congratulate you for some neat gizmos. I’ve noticed live search and, of course, your comment system. Both are very neat.
Michael, Bjørn is right – the tab alignment is slightly off in FF 1.0 on Win XP. See: screenshot
The tab alignment is slightly off inn Opera 7.50 also. Pluss, the tabs stay put if you resize the browser window, untill you hover them (also in Opera 7.50. This might be a browser related bug..).
I like it. Very simple, clean.
I like what you have done around here Michael. Nice and simple. I’m not all that hip on the pink, but all in all you’ve done a great job.
Weeee-Haaa, new shoes! Some minor pixel-alignment problems in Firefox, but other than that – So sweet!
Me again – sorry *g
I didn’t see the tabs, I spotted this one: http://www.onderka.com/wp-content/2004-11-21_bbonsai.jpg
Funny about the tabs, as I like it this way…
All I can say is.. 0_o
Fantastic work Micheal!!! And the live comment preview is wicked. I might be tempted to look at your code to see how it was done, as I’ve always admired the concept whenever I’ve seen it done.
Congratulations!
Gosh damn, I recently settled on an almost identical colour scheme for a site I’m working on. I quietly seethe. Looking good though, much to my chagrin.
Pretty, very pretty. I’m not too crazy about the blue you use for BG but i’m very picky when it comes to colors…
Let’s see what else is new…
Wow Michael – I am really impressed. The design feels very warm and light. And the colours you used (love ‘em) are very easy on the eyes.
The personal touches are indeed superb and make it so much more fun to come here, and spam you :P
This page degrades very well with styles disabled, except for the double numbering for comments and the live preview not completely wrapped in JS.
Sorry, I’m nitpicking… :/ Thumbs up!!
That pretty nice, Ive seen that pin up girl before. I think it was at a pizza place. Anyways, I read what had happened last night. Man, that was terrible. Good luck man! Ive been following your site for about a month now on RSS, keep up the good work!
From a functionality standpoint, it’s marvellous. I love the Welcome back… and the instant previewer.
Visually though, I have some problems. The font used for the titles is quite pixelated with WinXP’s standard font smoothing. I can’t use cleartype because my CRT makes it look fuzzy (as most do). It ticks me off because the actual font itself seems perfect for the site style. Maybe I should just buy an LCD and get it over with…
Aside from that, the hard pink just puts me off, though now doubt this is merely subjective, as Hollin said. It seems to be OK when used as a normal thin text link, but when it’s a bolded in the side bar, or when hovering, it just seems too harsh.
Overall, I’m impressed with the changes, but I think that deep down I long for the sleek looks of Binary Bonsai’s previous version. I loved that design to bits.
Very well done.
Absolutely gorgeous.
I have a cousin called Freya. She’s a little mentalist – not calm and collected like this one :-)
Chris, you’re right about the font on XP. And that is a problem, but I don’t quite know what I should do about it…
Michael, i sent a pingback to this article and comment weird displays.
my blog is in UTF8 encoding. sorry….
Yeah I noticed that. I had to delete it… :(
This is just awesome.
Danish dynamite ;-)!
If you put ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’ in the CSS after ‘Lucida Grande’ in the font family then most PCs will use their version of Lucida rather than Verdana, although I put Verdana after ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’ – just in case
Done and done.
Very nice design. I love the live preview. Very cool. The design is refreshing as well.
Oh my. Where’s the standard wordpress theme? Come on, use it! That’s what it’s there for! Why do people always want their personal webspace to look so personal…ugh!
Nah, kidding. Feels nice and airy and original. Like a mint. (the good kind)
Gorgeous! Right up my alley… 9!
I played around with the CSS in Firefox’s web developer extension, and I came up with only 2 possibilities, and neither are very good.
The worser of the two is to change the colour of the headings (h2) to silver instead of #333. The lack of contrast makes the jaggies less obvious, but it’s not really a solution. Makes no difference when you hover over them, either, as the pink still contrasts highly.
The only other suggestion I could think of would be to switch back to Trebuchet MS. Of the MS web fonts, only that and Verdana really were able to fit in with the site style at all. But I figured that you steered clear of them for a reason, else you would have used one of them in the first place.
I specifically went with Century Gothic because it is so seldomly used and its clean lines fit perfectly with the Freya design. I would feel really bad if I had to give in to using a font that I don’t really want simply because Windows fails in rendering something as basic as letters…
In an effort to not have two different discussions going, I am diverting this thread into the Freya Dissection comments. Please continue over there :)