Those who have followed me these last five years or so are probably aware that I designed and coded this site’s layout on my own in an effort to learn the basics of Web design. Thus, shadowm.rewound.net has been redesigned no less than eight times since its inception.
Dorset6, the last iteration prior to this day, was first deployed on May 11th, 2011. Since then, it has only received minor incremental updates addressing bugs and minor practical concerns that cropped up later, since I found the overall design to be pleasing to the eyes — at least until I got a new screen where the lighter blue colors turn out to be purpler than intended, oops!
The last maintenance update to Dorset6 was Delta 24, deployed on April 26 2014.
The underlying template engine, Poison Ivy, has not seen any architectural changes all these years since it was first deployed in 2010. In the meantime, however, I have learned more about API design from my experience with various other projects. It can be very disheartening to look back on past practices and realize you were doing things completely wrong in production software!
During this time I have also heard all the hype surrounding HTML5 and CSS3, and got to experience the results firsthand as large websites started making use of the new technologies. On top of that, support for Internet Explorer 6 is finally dying off, and Windows XP just reached its definitive end of life last month; software and Web developers everywhere rejoice as they no longer have to give support to grossly obsolete products from the early 2000s.
I have actually made use of CSS3 and forward features in shadowm.rewound.net since Dorset6, but right after deployment I decided to aim for leveraging more of their potential in the next iteration, Dorset 7. I promptly begun throwing around style and layout ideas. However...