Starsky!

The Starsky skinThere’s a new design in town. There are seven other skins here, but this is the first one that leaves the old layout completely behind. The others are all variations on a single design.

I’ve taken to calling this new skin the “Starsky & Hutch Go Flying” theme. It has a certain hip 70’s panache to it, don’t you think? The jets careening around at odd angles bring to mind my instrument flight training. Those of you who are IFR-rated pilots will know what I’m talking about. 🙂

Development was not without its challenges — it took some convincing to get Gallery to read the cookie set by the new PHP skinning method.

And Gallery provided another challenge: the Starsky skin’s graphic design was not meant to be flexible in width, but the photo gallery’s full-size images can be over 1000 pixels wide. Like this. A solution was implemented, but different browsers handle this in different ways. It looks most elegant in IE, but even in Opera and Netscape the design degrades quite gracefully for a fixed-width layout.

I’m starting to understand why very few people combine Movable Type and Gallery while making them skinnable with a common graphic design. I’ve also developed a new appreciation for the old layout’s elegance since it has always played quite nicely with Gallery.

A special thank you to Julie for the spiffy new layout!

Anyway, what do you think of the new look? I’m considering removing a couple of the older skins. Which ones should I take off the table?

  5 comments for “Starsky!

  1. Rich
    March 19, 2004 at 11:51 pm

    It’s a lot better than my “Lou Grant” motif over on my site.

  2. Ron
    March 20, 2004 at 1:43 am

    I don’t say this every day, but: nice ‘Lou Grant’ reference. Another 70’s leisure suit classic.

    The 70’s are highly underrated. I mean, the most intriguing character of that whole decade was named “Deep Throat”. You can’t compete with that.

  3. Rich
    March 20, 2004 at 8:01 am

    Agreed about the 70’s. You can’t go wrong with a decade that featured two prominent figures named H.R. (Haldeman and Puff’n’stuff). Who did more damage to the average American psychie is wholly left up to you.

  4. Ron
    March 20, 2004 at 1:46 pm

    Oooh, that’s a tough call. I wonder if Haldeman and Puff ‘n Stuff were related. They did sort of look alike….

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