Nuketown’s redesign launched in November 2012. It improved a lot, but there have been quite af few bugs that have cropped up since then. The redesign also caused some long-standing standing content (like the “Links” section) to disappear while I fought with how to handle it in the new design. In March I decided to sit down and knock out some of the most annoying issues … starting with the erratic header bar.
Years ago Nuketown had a weekly newsletter called “RADIATIONS”. It was lovingly handcrafted by me and included a list of the previous week’s stories. The kids pretty much killed that one — who has time to update a web site AND maintain a newsletter? It’s something that people have asked me to bring back, and … Read more
One of my goals with the Nuketown redesign was to aggressively pursue a social media strategy, rather then letting it simply flop around like a dying fish.
It’s alive! Nuketown 7 is now in production. It’s not quite finished yet — there are a couple of bugs here and there that need to be squashed — but the site has been upgraded to Drupal 7 and it’s running its spiffy new theme. The social media buttons are active and — amazingly — … Read more
The Nuketown7 redesign is finally done. Or rather, it’s finally done enough to launch. Over the next two weeks Nuketown will be on hiatus as I upgrade the site to Drupal 7 and implement the new theme. During the upgrade you can check out The Atomic Age for status updates. That’s my ancient Blogger site, and I’m dusting it off to support the downtime.
It’s the little things that kill you. Most of the broad strokes of the Nuketown Redesign are done: I have template for pages, nodes, microcontent, and blocks, and the site renders under the new theme without any major errors. Since last month my work has focused on building out the nooks and cranies of the theme. It’s stuff like block headers, the “read more” links, and sidebar bulleted lists.
In short, the little stuff … and it’s time consuming. Each component takes about two hours to knock out (though in the case of captions for images that’s more like 8 hours … and I’m still not done) as I tweak css and tweak template files. It is satisfying, in that each small piece that I complete brings its own sense of accomplishment but man, there are a lot of pieces.
I was distracted from my theming adventures by needing to re-jigger how Nuketown 7 handles Twitter updates but that landed in a good place.
One of my goals for the Nuketown 7 redesign project was to tightly integrate social media options into it. In particular I wanted to be able to capture all of that microcontent — the quick movie and book reviews, the game news, the retweets — that the site currently misses and incorporate it into the design. The key here isn’t that I’m simply trying to post tweets about new articles; I want to make microcontent an integral part of the site.
To do that the tweets needed to be captured as nodes, which would then allow me to manipulate and display them however I see fit. I accomplished this by creating a “microcontent” content type and then setting up the Feeds module to import tweets from my NuketownSF account via RSS.
Naturally once I got this working Twitter deprecated RSS feeds. As of March 2013, you’ll no longer be able to use them … and Nuketown’s microcontent import would cease to function.
Fortunately I have a Plan B: the Twitter module. When I started building out Nuketown7 I’d considered using this module, but it had two drawbacks:
Nuketown’s redesign project has slowly crept forward for the last year, but it saw a nice surge in progress this summer. First off, I have a solid Drupal 7 foundation for the site, with all of my social media, audio and visual, and content tools chosen and functional. I’ve also learned a heck of a … Read more
It’s been mighty quiet around here at Nuketown, partly because I’ve been super busy at work, but mostly because I’ve been slowly working on the redesign.
My current task is converting the design comps into an HTML/CSS compliant layout. After that, I’ll turn those pages into a functional Drupal 7 theme. The challenge has been that going with what I know, I decided to do the entire site in HTML5 and CSS3 … which means I’m spending a lot of time learning exactly how much I don’t know.
It’s not that HTML5 and CSS3 are earth-shatteringly different — a lot of the key concepts (at least with a simple web page) are the same. The challenge comes with HTML5’s new semantic markup. These are tags like “header”, “footer”, “article”, “section” and “aside” which are designed to give meaning to your markup.
The idea is that instead of just having a whole punch of div tags with IDs like “header” and “footer”, you use actual tags that let your web browser understand that this content is different. This in turn can be helpful for search engines, which know which areas of the site are content rich, as well as for accessibility, as accessible browsers are able to recognize headers, navigation, etc. and present them accordingly.
It took me a longer than I like, but I’ve finally worked up design comps for the Nuketown. These designs throw flesh on to the skeleton of the wireframes. There are some divergences; the original home page wireframe had a section for dedicated specifically to projects; I’ve removed that from the current iteration because it … Read more