Evolution

A few days ago I made a new skin for the website and I must say for the first time I'm quite satisfied with it. I didn't plan to do it now, it was just an experiment, but the result was so encouraging that I decided to make a new skin from it. It lost its 'individual' style, but it's much cleaner, readable and visually appealing. I'm not much of a web designer so I just tried to imitate designs that I like (for example the KDE website) and make it as simple as possible.

I always thought that fixed width layout is a bad thing, but I finally changed my mind as the width of the screen grows and the lines of text become annoyingly long. Now it doesn't fit entirely on a 800x600 screen, but I had to make it wider so that the images fit well. It's not a problem these days (recent statistics show that for 'technical' sites only about 3% of visitors use a resolution lower than 1024x768).

What's coming next? It's time to upgrade the engine of this website. Soon I'm going to start playing with the upcoming Drupal 6.0 because the version I'm using now is rather ancient. But I like the way it works now with all customizations that I made. It won't be an easy task to keep it working the same way.

Also, now that the WebIssues Client reached stable version I can finally work on another project. As I mentioned some time ago, I'm not inventing anything new, just removing dust from an old project. I recently started rewriting Fraqtive, the fractal generator, planning to give it a completely new look and feel, an improved engine (with support for SSE2 and multi-core processors and possibility to customize fractal types) and obviously porting it to Qt4. It may not be such serious project as WebIssues, but sometimes it's good to make something just for fun. It's too early to say precisely when it will be available, but I'd say spring is realistic.