Hi. I'm Paul Nixon, a designer living in Mountain View California. My days (and some nights) are spent designing websites for a little company in Cupertino. The rest of my time is spent with my beautiful wife and friends, road cycing and reading your blogs.

NiXLOG Redesign Notes

Tuesday, January 4, 2005 01: 32 PM

NiXLOG Redesign Notes.

Please Note: This design is a work in progress. Many of the subpages and archives still need new dark brown wrapper and layout. View the homepage to see what this post describes.

Please send any comments, rants or suggestions to nix (@) nixlog (.) com

Quick overview: I'm not shooting for the most usable, super-validating, mega-standards compliant site around -- there are plenty of those out there. What I am trying to create is something simple, but very different. Something that challenges the norm. For better or worse. Something I can learn from.

The Pain: As mentioned in an earlier post - Greg's recent call for more innovation in the weblog/web design community really hit home. Although he wasn't talking purely about weblog design, it was like hearing a doctor diagnose that pain that has been bugging you for some time, but you assumed there was no cure and just learned to live with it.

Over the past year I've grown frustrated with many things in the weblog/web design world, including:


  • 3-column CSS layouts

  • Limitations of 800x600 design

  • Cookie cutter feel of most blogs

  • My own site designs within the 3-column limitation.

  • The general lack of information/examples of CSS design beyond 3-columns. Yeah, there's some 4-column stuff, but not much.


NiXLOG went through 2 or 3 redesigns in 2004 -- I was grasping for something, anything to make me feel like my site was had something unique to offer -- while still providing blog content and functionality. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a single column of blog posts in chronological order -- it is the meat and potatoes of the blog world, it will always be with us...but I was tired of dinner. I wanted dessert.

The Cure: As I thought about blog design more, the idea of showing the posts horizontally by date, much like a weekly calendar, kept popping up in my head. I had seen lots of horizontal scrolling sites, but I didn't recall seeing a horizontal blog site organized by date like this (I'm sure I'm not the first to create this...surely there are several out there -- I just don't recall seeing any.) I played with the idea a bit early last year, making several sketches, laying out some ideas in Photoshop, but was still too green with CSS layouts and wasn't yet experimenting with Movable Type plug-ins. Yet the idea wouldn't leave my head. I even went so far as setting up Movable Type to automatically create horizontal tables with each new post and it worked (see example), but I wanted a CSS layout. Then came Greg's post. I knew it was time.

What I love about this experiment so far:


  • It's different. CSS design with 6-columns (1 nav, 5 content) -- who wants 3 when you can have 6? Different enough to discuss the merits, advantages and disadvantages of such a design and see where it takes my thinking.

  • Creates a mental pause. I love the fact that design forces you to stop, take notice and get oriented with the blog, unlike most vertical designs that seem too familiar on the first visit.
  • Future ready -- today! Most mainstream designers do not design for Netscape 4.7, the browser is dated and the user base shrinking daily. The same might be said someday for 800x600 monitors. Yes, there will "always" be some users (especially as the baby-boomers age and eye sight goes), but five years from now I think 1024x will be the new minimum standard. The time to enter the 1024x age is close at hand. Why not start experimenting with blog designs now? Web stats showing steady decline of 800x600.
  • Visual snapshot. As soon as NiXLOG loads you have an immediate context for how much information has been posted the past five days. You don't usually get that with vertical blogs without scrolling past the new posts to the last one you remember reading. You also see the days when I've posted nothing -- to me this is a great motivator to find good content. I don't want blank days on my site.

  • What's old is new. We've seen weekly calendars for years, all designed around dates to be filled with content. For NiXLOG I really wanted to present a "weekly calendar" view of posts (only flipped, with the newest of the left, oldest on the right). Plus, Horizontal is the new Vertical. I love landscape oriented design

What I'm not worried about just yet:


  • Standards/Validation. This is an ongoing experiment - with a lot tweaking, fine-tuning, etc. Validation, standards, etc. are coming with time. I just wanted to get a working version out there to see what the possibilities are.

  • Printing. Not sure people print my site, but going to be working on a print-friendly style sheet sometime.

  • 800x600 users. See below.

  • CSS. My CSS is probably terrible by most pros standards, but such is life. As I learn I apply and tweak. I'm not afraid to put it out there -- what's the worse that can happen? Yep, you'll suggest improvements and that will make me even better.

Some challenges:


  • 1040x Design. Most readers of NiXLOG are on higher resolution monitors. Still, there's no reason I can't have an 800x600 CSS switcher for those that would prefer it. It's in the works (4-column, showing three days). The other thing the design requires is that users have their web browser maximized to take it all in and prevent a horizontal scroll bar from appearing. Still usable with the bar though.

  • Style sheet off. Turn off the style sheet and all the content is there, but because of the way the columns are structured, the dates are not ordered correctly. Working on that.

  • Other typical usability, standards issues when going with a funky new design. Making a list.

  • Content space. When you play with 6-columns within a 1000 pixel width, you have to limit the width of each column. I wanted two things with this design: 1) vertical nav and 2) 5 days in view. These requirements forced me to go a little narrow on the content column for each day (150px), but I really liked how the layout turned out.

Inspiration for my design:

Tools in Use:


  • Moveable Type 3.0

  • Somedays (Movable Type Plug-in): Used to -1, -2, -3 dates to grab yesterday, day before yesterday, etc.

  • A Movable Type plug-in that allows you to run a cron job at a specific time to republish a template. The homepage republishes just after midnight, loading up the next days blank date.

  • Cron jobs (via Dreamhost account)

  • CSS Trial and Error (Patented process I have for trying a lot of things, dissecting other people's code, shedding some tears and losing hair because I never stopped to learn the fundamentals.)