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Sometimes informative rants or ramblings on design or css.

Updates in 2026?!

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I spent some time today finally deciding and migrating my old webserver. Kupatrix and the other domains, alongside kupax.com, are all running on a new backend and more secure setup. I’d been putting it off because I thought it would be a lot of trouble, but it turns out to not be that bad.

The current design for the site is a little broken (what is wrong with the menu?!), but I will update it over the next bit, it shouldn’t take too much trouble thanks to how good Catchbox still is. Not a fan of this new way to post to wordpress though, I really miss the old method, maybe there’s a plugin for it…

It’s interesting a lot of the old manual tweaky things I did to the previous VPS/droplet aren’t needed this time around, the backend solution I chose is already built with security in mind, and Digital Ocean has gotten much easier in spinning up and configuring things. Cloudflare especially is really useful now, I can just setup rules to just straight up block any access to stuff no one should be touching.

I plan to use my personal site more (famous last words) but this was the first big step in getting it figured out. Hopefully all the old images are back up and will work properly.

Slider Quirkiness

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I’ve been working with Catch Box, this theme I found on the wordpress theme directory, and so far I’ve been really impressed, it’s not too difficult to modify to suit my needs, but I just wanted to post about some quirkiness in relation to the slider: It actually changes height depending on the length of the excerpt. This happens to push content down, or pull it up, depending on which slide is being shown. Sort of annoying, eh? How did I fix it? Added the following to the CSS:

#slider {max-height:280px!important;width:auto;}
#slider a {display:block!important;}

Themes, Themes Everywhere!

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I’ve been playing around with a few themes lately, I had been using Swift but it was coded so rigidly that any changes messed it up. I really don’t want to spend my time basically recoding something from scratch, but at the same time I’d like to make it my “own”, you know? Well until I find a good one, I guess I’ll keep looking.

And, maybe it’s just me, but a lot of the styles out there (premium or not) seem to scream “BOOTSTRAP” at me (or any other popular framework). Don’t get me wrong, some of them are really really good, but I don’t want to look like yet another bootstrap site.

Also, apparently people who like dark designs are the minority now!

Separate Theme for Mobile!

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So I decided to stop my crappy attempt at an thrown together mobile layout and just go with a new theme. I worked my way through sandbox (I keep an updated version, but this time I stripped it down) and implemented a variation of the 978 grid for mobile devices. After I threw together something in photoshop (it really didn’t need to be that complicated, remember a mobile device has less screen real estate, so sidebars and the like were thrown out) I threw up the new theme, tweaked it, and there we go!

It was interesting working on it but trying to stay away from pixel sizes, but aside from the grid, everything uses ems for margins, padding, etc… Didn’t take me much time either, I know you can get fancy for mobile, but I’ve always prescribed to KISS, “Keep It Simple Stupid”, when it comes to designs.

Mobile CSS Isn’t Easy

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I’ve had an iOS device for ages now, by today’s standards it’s a dinosaur, but it is useful for a few things besides as an ebook reader — testing my sites with a mobile device. For awhile I’ve just ignored my personal site as the main area you could zoom-in on pretty easily and it was “readable” for the most part… However today I decided to go a step further and target mobile users specifically. Continue reading Mobile CSS Isn’t Easy→