Skinning the Blog!

All righty. It seems we just can’t win when it comes to NUblog colour schemes. We do a light-on-dark we like, and Netscapers can’t read it. We accommodate their disability and it’s gripe, gripe, gripe.

So let’s try something new.

We’re big fans of Haiku the Blog. Love the name, reminiscent of an old Python sketch. A rather creative juxtaposition of a centuries-old format with a mere sapling.

We invite designers to Skin the Blog. In the spirit of Mozilla (ahem – cough), MacAmpcast, Kaleidoscope, and related applications that let you alter appearance, we want you to redesign the NUblog.

Rules

  1. You’re working with the kind of text-heavy content you’re looking at now.
  2. Your design cannot invalidate any of the metadata we use – not a single ALT, TITLE, or LONGDESC – or any accessibility feature. If you don’t include that markup, we will.
  3. The words “NUblog” (note the case) and “A Weblog on online content and everything that entails” must appear. Beyond that, go nuts.
  4. If we like your skin, we use it for no more than a month. (If there are many entries we favour, the rotations may be quicker.)
  5. You own the design outright and forever. We continue to own the content. (There’s that troublesome content/interface distinction again – but we’ll leave that for another day.) We delete it after we’re done with it. We have the right merely to write appropriate metadata and to archive screenshots for use online between now and the day the earth crashes into the sun (with full credits at all times).
  6. Your design has to work on any browser that can understand tables. It doesn’t have to work optimally on all of them, but basic function must be assured.
  7. There are no prizes, cash or otherwise, other than a big thank-you and maybe a soy milkshake if you ever come visit. If plied with enough compliments, we might take you out for double espresso, but don’t push your luck.
  8. Some technical limitations may exist related to our Linux server. We’ll cross those bridges when we come to them.

A model we like

It’s a bit of an experiment, this. (Has anyone done it before?) We were quite inspired by the designer vérité collection of Web designers’ Macintosh desktops over at Kaliber 10000. We get to gaze voyeuristically at a window on the soul, the desktop display. (Beats the hell out of the 1980s window on the soul, the WordPerfect supplementary spellcheck dictionary.)

We are opening up our soul to yours. You may project your design desires onto our content. We’ve got to like your stuff, of course, but we have pretty good taste. Try us.

Posted on 2000-08-01

(NUblog: Joe Clark)