Muffinresearch Labs by Stuart Colville

The Colophon

This site is about the 4th version of Muffin Research Labs. This current design began when I decided to enter the may 1st CSS reboot. As this design will be coming together by Nov 1st 2005 I might just consider this November reboot!

Cleaner code

In this revision I have re-written most of the mark-up and CSS from the ground-up. The ids and class names are more meaningful abbreviations of what content they hold.

sContainer =>  Site Container
sContPri   =>  Site Content Primary
subNav     =>  Sub navigation

Floated Columns

The special feature on this site has to be the floated columns. These are designed to wrap under each other using the natural properties of floats as the viewport gets smaller. To prevent the columns from dropping down to under the primary content on the left I have employed a container div. The primary content is fixed-width as I wanted to be able to reliably use a set width of image in my content pages.

As the prime audience of this blog is the web-development community I expect the majority of my users to be running 1024×768. However, although some sites recently have ditched support for users of 800×600 screens I still wanted those users to be able to see all of the content.

For more on this layout please read my write-up: Drop Column Layouts

Back end

Whilst at the start of the 4th revision I was running my own back-end with Funky caching in February of 2006 I started work on moving over to WordPress. The main reasons for the change were mostly about time as I had little time to continue to develop my own backend and I needed that time to spend on content and other projects.

The templates are heavily customised to fit the existing markup. I have also fully re-written the archive templates to emulate those on my own backend.

Thanks

Thanks to Tim for being a “bloody good bloke” and always being around for a discussion on semantics amongst other much darker topics ;-). Thanks to Phu Ly for being available to help me sort out why my WordPress search results were getting mangled. Thanks also for the wonderful Silk Icon set by FAMFAMFAM.