Ooh, pretty redesign!
You may (or may not) have noticed that a couple of things look a bit different around here.
Specifically, a complete redesign for the front page and recipe page for the first time in many years. Long overdue, I might add.
The idea and 90% of the implementation came from the amazing and wonderful Marleigh Miller, who has many dinners coming her way for this. The other 10% was me stumbling around with learning CSS and figuring out how to tweak things by trial and error, and somehow I managed not to break everything she gave me. (Actually, I did break them — several times — but figured out how to fix them without too much weeping and hair-tearing.)
“It’s Web 2.0!” she says. And how. Actual pictures, sliding from one to the next to actually give you something nice to look at, plus all the words are still there. I’m inordinately proud of the fact that the site still looks fine on a UNIX terminal text-based browser like Lynx.
Gradually I’ll be going through the entire site and spiffing things up, adding CSS to the individual pages and photos where I can, trying to hunt down broken links (because any site dating back to the early 1990s that still has lists of links is now 99-44/100% link rot) and doing other gradual improvements. I’ll add to and change the over photos periodically as well.
There are a few other things. I know that the use of the term “page” and “pages” is kinda Web 1.0, but since this site has been called “The Gumbo Pages” for almost 20 years I’m kinda stuck with it. I did activate my personal email domain for the web too, so you can now also access the site via this link:
I’d also like to keep up with updates to the site, but that old (and hideously ugly) “What’s New” page is going away. I decided that the best way to deal with updates about what’s happening with the site without cluttering up Looka! with them and without having to go through the trouble to start a separate WordPress page (a pain in the arse in its own right) I just started a Tumblr. It was really easy to set up and will be easy to maintain, and will only involve what’s new with the site in general — what’s been updated or redesigned or added or whatever. That will be available from the “Updates” link in the title/logo bar, and the direct URL is:
If you’d like to add it to your RSS reader, the RSS feed’s URL is:
http://gumbopages.tumblr.com/rss
Wesly has expressed interest in posting here again. W00t!
We’re both about to get to work on rewriting and revamping the horrendously outdated “What to do in New Orleans” page, so that’ll likely be the next big project.
Great things are afoot! I hope they’ll make things nicer for y’all.
Rob said:
Jul 22, 13 at 9:22 amIt all looks fantastic! I think that it is wonderful that you are back around the site, wb sir.
Brian said:
Jul 22, 13 at 1:32 pmVery nice. Glad to see it retains the character of the original. I was hoping that wouldn’t get lost in the redesign 🙂
Chuck said:
Jul 22, 13 at 1:37 pmWhew. Glad you like it. Doubly glad it retains the character of the original without looking like a 1995 homepage.
😀
Eric said:
Jul 30, 13 at 6:23 amI read the title as ‘Oh, pretty red sign!’
What does it all mean?
Chuck said:
Jul 30, 13 at 8:27 amPretty red sign …
SamChevre said:
Jul 31, 13 at 10:49 amIt looks good.
The feature that made this my go-to blog for cocktails was the category index, so no matter what ingredient I had I could get a list of all your posts using it. I greatly miss the complete category index.
Great to see new posts again!
Chuck said:
Jul 31, 13 at 1:51 pmI was not happy that the categories were wiped out.
I’m going to fix them though — it’s going to take going through each cocktail post and rebuilding them manually, one at a time. It’ll be tedious and annoying and it’ll take a while, but I’ll get through it.