Inspired by a number of amazing, professional sites, I spent a bunch of time working with TimK on creating my own version of a style switcher. To be honest, at this point the code is rather ham-handed and I’ll be looking to improve it in the near future. But for now, it’s pretty cool, and allows you to pick your favorite of three themes. Or, you can click the transparent button and the theme will be chosen for you based on my current time and weather conditions. Play around with it and let me know what you think.
In other web deisgn-related thoughts, I’m running into a bit of trouble with the last.fm plugin. I’ve been playing through a lot of my older or more obscure music and as a result, a lot of songs in non-western character formats have been coming up. That’s causing character craziness to appear in the sidebar that, predicably, breaks XHTML validation (since they’re not a part of UTF-8). htmlspecialchars is already in use on that output, but I guess that isn’t enough? I’m going to have to read up about it when I get the chance, but in the meantime, trust me. Aside from those song titles (which should be out of the list soon) the site validates.
Was it good for you, too?
You need to make so that when I’m reading a story and click on a different theme I stay on that story and don’t go back to the main page.
I liked it when I saw it in developmental stage, and I think you would benefit from adding other themes to it as you go along. I could imagine a winter scene or a falling of leaves theme.
Still, looks good.