what happened to the freaky letters?
Morning came cold and wet and I looked down upon my creation and lo, I saw that Malaise was overrun by crazies, ne’er-do-wells, bastards and romantics. And, verily, as god did, so have I done. The deluge washed them out and deposited them upon Malaise’s doppelgänger, Letters from Underground. I encourage you to visit them there—word is that company helps them cope.
remaking malaise
Fair warning: this post deals almost entirely with boring and esoteric things like design, web standards, layout engines, and typography. If you enjoy that sort of thing or are in the least curious, dig in, otherwise I’d like to invite you to take yourself out for a nice bowl of chowder or something. I’ll leave this post up for a yet-undetermined period and then move most of it to its permanent home, on the colophon page.
The current version of the site is called Malaise:Lithium. Previous versions of the site have been internally dubbed New Malaise, Ain’t No More Malaise, Malaise Take3, Paper Malaise, Malaise: Tokyo Showdown, and Malaise: Live at Budokan. Future iterations may or may not have similarly obscure titles.
browsers and standards
Malaise was built with WordPress, OS X, valid XHTML Transitional code, coffee and a pervasive fear of exposure as a fraud. The fancy bits of the CSS are based on draft CSS3 specifications. Not all of the CSS will not validate, however, due to the use of some experimental pre-CSS3 features of the Gecko and Webkit layout engines. For this reason the CSS3 properties have been placed in a separate stylesheet.
If you’re lucky enough to be using a browser that implements the relevant CSS3 features, you will have already been treated to some sweet shadows, succulent opacities and crispy-fried text effects. If you’re not, you won’t notice it because all of these should degrade nicely.
If you’re unlucky enough to be using any version of Internet Explorer to partake of Malaise in the Time of Cholera, you will not enjoy many of the subtler and prettier features of malaise because I have fed your browser a dumbed-down version of the site to prevent if from choking, b0rking, or BSODing. You might, however, take a moment to look at what you’re missing…
The following two screenshots should look pretty familiar to you if you’ve been using Internet Explorer.
Here are the same two slices of Malaise rendered in a better browser.
Please, upgrade your browser. Internet Explorer makes a mess of the web and is not safe. Nor will it likely be anytime soon.
Credit and acknowledgement is due to the good folks at sndbx, from whom I learnt about themes and hooks and all that, Derek Punslan, from whom I swiped the idea of the image for a post and the translucent title pane, and j9, whose alpha testing, tolerance for babbling gobbledygook and ceaseless biscotti production may well be the only thing that pulled me through.
about typography
Considering that after all the code and pictures and fancy animated deliciousness are over this is really supposed to be a forum on which I write, ease of reading is very important to me. Previous versions of Malaise in the Time of Cholera have eschewed readability in favor of attractiveness, or attractiveness in favor or readability. This version, I hope, manages a workable balance between them.
For some reason everyone on the internet has forgotten about indenting the first line of paragraphs. I haven’t. I’ve also set the site in a modern, geometric, sans-serif font (Century Gothic, if you have it, Twentieth Century or Helvetica Neue if you don’t) and given it a generous line height. There’s enough contrast for easy reading but not so much as to tire the eyes.
Further, I’ve incorporated a plugin from Hamish to use the Typogrify filters to dress up the glyphs around the place. Double-hyphens are replaced by proper em-dashes. Generic quotation marks are replaced with nice directional curly ones. Ampersands can be specially styled. Sweet, huh?
one more thing
Another change that is perhaps harder to notice is the use of words instead of numerals in many places around the site. I found a PHP script meant to do just that written by Hugh Bothwell, who kindly granted me permission to use it. The result is that instead of a heading reading, “There are 9 comments,” it now reads, “There are nine comments.” That bit of stylistic incorrectness has grated on me ever since my first steps into the computerated interwebs and I’ve only just recently figured out how to do.
Anyway, enough babble. If you notice anything it seems I’ve overlooked or have comments or suggestions, please contact me.