Finally had a chance to put the finishing touches on a new design for this site. I’ve been thinking about this new design for about four months, and working on the actual code on and off for the past two weeks. The last time I redesigned was in April of 2010—nearly a year and a half ago. For me, that’s a personal record (I’ve redesigned this site 20 times in the past 6 years alone).
The focus this time around was:
A completely new thing for me: I based this design on a theme. I purchased the HIGH RES Theme by JSTN and used that as a base to customize and design on. I’ve been coveting the HIGH RES theme for months now and it was a lot of fun to make it my own.
In addition, I accidentally and shamelessly took Will’s idea for a rounded-avatar header. He claims he has forgiven me, but I’m not so sure.
bleything asked:
What do you do with the old designs for your website? I looooooved the blue site from a couple of designs ago but you changed it before I could steal any of the ideas.
I retire them permanently. You can view screenshots of the 17 most recent designs in the Maniacal Rage Design Archive set at Flickr. I get asked occasionally to share past designs but I never have. Each design is uniquely mine and a lot of hard work, and I don’t like the idea of visiting another site and having it look exactly like mine—even if it looks like an older version.
nekcihc-deactivated20110116-dea asked:
So that picture you posted of the phone being gutted came up on my dash and at first glance I read your url as 'media carnage.'
Well, “media carnage” is better than some of the other pronunciations I’ve heard in the past 10 years. Because my primary email address is my name @ this domain, I often have to give out said address in stores or over the phone. I always preface the info by saying, “This is a long one, but here goes,” and then I rattle off letter after letter. Most of the time, when I’m done, the sales rep or whoever tries to pronounce it. The most common mispronunciation is “mania calrage”. What the hell is “calrage”? Also common: “manny-ackarage”. Again, those aren’t even words.
The funny thing about all these issues is that I chose the name Maniacal Rage in 1999 after seeing a guest appearance by Joe Pesci on Saturday Night Live in which he completely mispronounces the word “maniacal” when telling Jim Brewer (who is playing a poor version of Joe Pesci) that he’s actually a calm person who doesn’t “burst into lunatic, maniacal rage”. Except he says “may-knee-ackal” instead of “man-eye-icle”. (Watch the sketch—Pesci’s appearance starts around 6:40.) I thought it sounded funny, bought the domains, and here we are more than 10 years later.
Of course, at the time, I never considered that I’d be in my thirties spelling out maniacal rage to a mortgage broker.
A few people have asked me how I made the sidebar of my site stick around when scrolling the page. Normally, that’s just a fixed position setting, but I also needed it to scroll initially and then stay after a certain vertical region of the page was reached. To accomplish this, I use Javascript to detect scrolling and change the position of the sidebar depending on where you’ve scrolled to. Here’s the sloppy code (based in part on a few code samples from places I cannot remember), in which I’ve set the vertical scroll limit at 118px:
window.onscroll = function()
{
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) // avoid IE6
{
e = document.getElementById('sidebar');
s = document.documentElement.scrollTop;
x = self.pageYOffset;
if (s > 118 || x > 118)
{
e.style.position = 'fixed';
e.style.top = '10px';
}
else
{
e.style.position = 'relative';
e.style.top = '128px';
}
}
}
You’ll probably want to wrap this stuff in a conditional to rule out Mobile Safari (iPhone and iPad) since it acts wonky on those devices. Should at least provide a starting point, though.
Anonymous asked:
How come you don't show post notes on permalink pages?
I do now, so thanks for the push. I’m still not thrilled with how Tumblr handles notes via the theming system (i.e. I’m using Javascript to hide what I don’t want to show once the page loads), but I guess I’ll leave them showing for now. I’m just not sure they add much to the page.
Now, say, if I could specify that only notes containing the words, “Awesome post!” or “You’re the best!” or “I’m a super attractive lady and hoping to sleep with you ASAP because of this photo reblog!” then I would be far more interested in the whole notes thing.
I sort of took an unplanned hiatus from updating this site, Prettify and That’s Not Art over the past week and a half as I worked on other projects and cleaning up the apartment. I should be getting back to everything this week, though. You know, in case you really needed to know.
