Archive for the ‘Blogging’ category

…the making of a Web page logo

January 16th, 2010

You may have noticed some changes in how my blog looks after my recent changes.  The most notable changes are:

  • A revised page header which includes a new “search” capability and a different treatment for the title text.
  • Different fonts for article titles and text.  In particular, i spent some time getting the hyperlink text to stand out from the rest fo the text.  If you look closely, the links are not only bold, they are another font entirely.
  • A new “What i’m writing about” block to the right which shows  topics based on how often I discuss them.

The final browser icon for my website.

Sadly, one of the details I spent the most time on is much less obvious than those broader design elements.  I decided to make a unique Web Page Logo for the blog, commonly known as a “favicon”.

If you are viewing this blog on a modern tabbed web browser, you will see a little logo for each web page in the tabs.  If I make no effort as a web designer, a generic logo is provided by the browser.  I decided this wasn’t good enough, and wanted to create something attractive but simple.  This was a difficult challenge, as you are limited to 16×16 pixels, which is excruciatingly small.

My inspiration for the logo is the strongly typographic logos used by a variety of web services today such as Facebook, Google and Bing.  I wanted something that fit somewhere between a literal ”letter in a box” and an abstract ”logo”.  I particularly liked the idea of text bleeding off the edge of a logo since it feels less rigid.

Browser icons from several popular web services.

As you can see, I went through several iterations before designing the final logo.   (I also tried a similar concept using the whole word “tom”, but 16 pixels was inadequate to fit the word in a readable manner.)  The final design is unique enough to aid in quick recognition, but is still logically tied to my name and the web site identity, since it uses the same color palette.

Since my WordPress theme came with a logo (left), I decided to make a more personal logo.

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Moved to WordPress

January 13th, 2010

I have moved my blog over from the Blogger platform to WordPress.  I chose wordpress as it is well known for good typographic control and extensibility.

I think it will be flexible to achieve my goal for the blog, showcasing all of my posts at the tomalphin.com website, but eventually offering readers who only care about one of the topics I discuss to read and subscribe to just that part of the blog. I hope that wordpress will allow me to use a slightly different visual style for each of these sub-pages.

In the meantime, please excuse the rough edges. I plan to personalize the template soon to give it a personal feel. I just picked the first decent template I found.

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Sporadic musings by a guy with a computer

September 24th, 2009

I am trying a new blog with a less clear focus. My prior efforts at http://ghettohardware.com were inconsistent at best. We did a little better with our wedding blog at http://amyandtom.net, but needless to say, the wedding has passed (excellently, I should add.) and we haven’t taken up a habit as the couple that blog’s together.

Another reason I am revisiting blogging is a recent discovery that Google Reader is a nice RSS Reading experience. It is always accessible to me by visiting that URL and logging in, it remembers what i have read and what I haven’t, and it makes the experience of reading blogs with only sporadic contributions worth my time. I have a couple everyday reading blogs (engadget, fatwallet) which have zillions of articles but relatively little deeply interesting content. By contrast, my favorite blogs are either by friends, or interesting blogs which go days without any new content. (such as The Map Room.)

A final reason for my revisiting blogging is that I feel like a variety of my recent interests might be worth writing about. I have reinvested attention in my urban gardening project, in part thanks to reading the book ‘Animal Vegetable Miracle’. (mixed opinion, maybe I’ll blog about it later.)

In the meantime, subscribe to my blog with your favorite newsreader, and hopefully I will say something interesting before you delete my feed!

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