Thripp.com is now 30% faster than I said it was in my previous post. Brilliant Photography gets the biggest chunk of the speed boost, because it was the slowest to start.

All the HTML is now one line. That doesn’t yield a big speed improvement, but it’s just cool. The big thing is that I turned small images into CSS sprites and merged all the JavaScript files into one honker (148KB). That file is compressed with gzip if your browser allows it, and all the current ones do, so the bandwidth hit is only 45KB. Still big, I know, …

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I made the sidebar 30 pixels wider by taking away space from the content. The blog area is still wide at 778 pixels, so it doesn’t hurt anything. This makes a big difference because the sidebar was too wide before. You can give your categories longer names without the names wrapping, and I added the count for each one in parenthesis next to it, thanks to wp_list_categories with the argument, show_count=1 in WordPress MU.

I’m taking advantage of the extra space by clarifying things. Instead of “Search Here” and “Search All,” the search engines say “Search This Blog” and “Search All …

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I spent the last six hours working on a redesign for Thripp.com. While I normally deal with programming, this time it was all CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Check this out; the boring old design:

And the bold new vision:

What do you think? I like it a lot. The new header and borders solidify olive green as the Thripp.com color, and the borders are pleasing to the eye for containing the content. The sidebar’s text isn’t so squished, links are nice and bold there, visited links go brighter green, the header is white on dark olive-green, …

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Hello everyone. I updated the stylesheet so it caps the width of the text at 830 pixels. I was under the belief before that I should use as much as the screen as possible, but after noticing how hard it is to follow a line on a big monitor (anything bigger than 1024×768), I’ve changed my mind. If you’re viewing in a wider window than that, the lines get no longer and just stay centered on the page with white on the sides.

The sidebar is anchored to the top-right of the page no matter what, but if you have a …

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