Frank Schaap is my hero. He tidied my rather diverse margin-left, right and centres (as it were), suggested a slightly different font that apparently will actually look good on all browsers (sadly my beloved old Verdana size=”medium” really doesn’t look that great on Windows, and it doesn’t even exist on most *nix platforms) and loaded that big image to the left through CSS, as a background to the left column, instead of in the HTML and did a few more things and now it all seems to be wonderful!

Except that instead of gracefully loading bit by bit into my browser window it all now sort of waits a few sinks and then winks into view all at once. I suppose I should reduce the image sizes. Ah well.

Thank you thank you thank you Frank! (PS he also does interesting research and has a cool blog, fragment.nl. His book is excellent too: an ethnology of a online gaming society, a role-playing MOO, actually)

7 thoughts on “frank schaap is my hero

  1. Frank

    Actually, Verdana is the font that almost every Windows installation will use to render your website and it looks good too. The “Lucida Grande” font is (almost) exclusive to OSX and will give the site a bit of a distinguished look for OSX surfers (imho). You can take out the “Lucida Grande” and OSX will likely display the site with Verdana 🙂

    The “Bitstream Vera Sans” and “Luxi Sans” are there primarily for *nix browsers. See, if an OS doesn’t have the first font in the list, it will try the next one, and the next one, etc. till it finds a font that it as.

    Setting the font-size to 76% on the body and setting it to 1.1em for the body text actually renders pretty much like “medium” sized. Maybe it looks a bit different for you now, because you see it rendered with Lucida Grande.

    btw I see I forgot to take out the original “verdana, sans-serif” definition and now it gets redefined a couple of lines later. No biggie, but you can safely remove the first font-family definition 🙂

  2. Frank

    oh… and *blush* I’m honored to be a hero ;-P

  3. Nina Terese

    Your blogg looks great now!

  4. Jill

    Thanks, Frank! I quite like the Lucida Grande – I might try Verdana again in a few days and see which I ultimately prefer.

    Still quite a few details to fix. I think I’ll start by getting those round corners on the blue background working properly.

    Thanks Nina Therese – hey, nice round-cornered boxes you have in your new design, btw!

    🙂

  5. fivecats

    The site looks great. Very slick and polished. My favorite part is how you continue the blue of your t-shirt into the full right-hand border. Clever use of color.

    (Frank, you did a great job getting all of the rough edges smoothed over! BTW, we work with a Shaaper over here in the states. Is there a family link in your last names?)

    First she gets interviewed on the Beeb, then she gets all fancy with her blogsite. Geez, what’s next?

  6. Frank

    I don’t think there’s any family link there. “Schaap” is not a terribly uncommon name in the Netherlands, so even if you find someone with that exact name, there doesn’t have to be any familial connection.

  7. Donut Age

    CSS Hacks
    Jill Walker has been redesigning her blog (the new design looks very slick by the way) and has posted on a few of the CSS tricks she has learned in the process…

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