MilkHub

So I've finally done it, I've made my very own design for MilkHub and found the perfect chance to release it following CSS Naked Day! This has also given me the chance to get started on getting my photos from Flickr. I've hit a couple of bumps in the road, most notably losing a nicely working copy of the Flickr code but never mind.

The new design

Has been inspired mostly by the Industrial Template from Free CSS Templates and the idea for the drop columns came from Muffin Research Labs. There are still some things that I need to work out. The sidebar doesn't quite feel right, but I think a few subtle lines here and there, and some padding / margin tweaks should do the job.

Points of interest

A couple of neat little tricks that I've picked up, I'll note them here and may document them more fully in the future if there's interest? The footer line is built up of short paragraphs and the following CSS is used so that the whole of each paragraph is always on the same line, simple but effective.

The next trick is the photo taglist, for browsers that support the following features you should notice a few things... The bottom alphabet list is fixed in place so that it's always visible. This list will hide behind the footer when you scroll to the bottom of the page so that it doesn't obscure the footer. And when you select a letter that block is highlighted with a border and background colour.

Finally, and probably the least supported feature, we have the resize ability on the code blocks throughout the site. As far as I am aware the only browser currently supporting this is Safari. If you head over to the Paste Bin you might spot little resize handles in the bottom right corners. I've added some extra CSS in to make sure that if you resize the code box in the content area it goes over any code boxes in the sidebar.

What's next?

There's quite a bit still to go into Flickr. I have no support for sets or pools yet, no support for navigation next/previous through photos (that'll come with sets / pools), I need to pull out the comments on each photo from flickr, and I'd like to add a related photos box. There's a few sidebar modules missing from around the site too; I'm thinking of one for the home page and one for the user pages, i.e. "Photos of me".

I'm going to be reworking the bookmarks to be entirely feed/api based rather than importing them into the site. I need to check whether the API allows this or not.

I'd like to start using categories for my blog as well as or instead of using tags. I think that a simple category structure will help me to organise the blog, the tags can be used to add extra information. It'll also give me a chance to work on a better category + tag picker for cCMS!