Minima|eesm

Lo and behold!!! The all new theme of denslee.com is finally here!!!

I’m calling it the Minima|eesm theme for its simple, clean and minimal design.

Previous design

This is the second time I redesign my blog. The previous design was done early of the year on 1st January 2009.

I really like the previous design for its colourful header. But I needed a more flexible layout to accommodate bigger pictures.

So I decided to redesign. Although I’ve planned this redesign since August but I’ve got no time to do it until recently.

Inspiration

This time, inspiration came from a website I kind of stumble upon. It’s the Ministry of Type.

I love its simple and minimal design so I decided to go for minimalist design.

What’s new

Let me explain to you what changes I’ve done compare to the previous design and how I did it.

One of the biggest change is of course, as you can see, clean and minimal. Besides, I’m using HTML5 and a little bit of CSS3 for this.

At the top of the page is my latest Twitter status grabbed from Twitter using the Twitter Tools plugin.

I’ve added the related posts as well (appears in single post pages only). This is a difficult one. First of all, I have to use the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) to generate the related posts. I’ve tried several plugins but YARPP gives the most accurate results compare to other plugins. But too bad it doesn’t generate thumbnails. So I have to modify the codes to use another PHP script timthumb to grab the first picture in the posts and generate a thumbnail out of it. I spent a few days doing that.

Next, the scroll follow thingy. It’s the post information and the comment form that keep following you wherever you scroll. It’s rather easy to achieve this effect. I used the jquery-scroll-follow JavaScript and with just a few lines of JavaScript and it’s done.

Ok, the next one is something I am most proud of and spent the most time doing it. The timeline archive page. It’s accessible from the footer via the “View all posts” link. I saw it first at astheria.com and immediately I knew I’ve got to do this. The difficult part is not only I have to group all posts by month, but I have to calculate the distance between the posts according to their difference in days.

Beside all the big changes, there are other smaller changes as well like using icons from bwpx.icns project by Paul Armstrong, using the sIFR for replacing the headers with Helvetica Neue Thin, comment author’s avatar grabbed from gravatar.com and also the next and previous post navigation.

Conclusion

Of course this is not 100% done yet. I’m still making some minor changes here and there. But overall, I’m very very happy with the result. If you have any suggestions or bug report, please leave a comment.

Update: changed font embedding and scroll follow.