[Image: “Baby Black Hole,” from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Says the description at Flickr: “This is an artist’s impression of a growing supermassive black hole located in the early Universe, showing a disk of gas rotating around the central object that generates copious amounts of radiation. This gas is destined to be consumed by the black hole. The black hole’s mass is less than one hundredth of the mass it will have when the Universe reaches its present day age of about 13.7 billion years.”]
As you can probably tell if you’ve visited Running After My Hat in the past, there’s been significant overhaulage. For starters, compare the size of the image above to the one which heads the previous post, from yesterday. Quite a bit bigger, eh?Not so obvious: the above image will shrink and grow at smaller and larger screen sizes, respectively. (I artificially limited the maximum display size here to 2048 pixels wide, but that was primarily to keep the file size down. If you click on the header image, you’ll get the whole thing — at 3300 pixels wide. It will probably still display smaller, but trust me, it’s the whole thing, as you can see if you save the enlarged image to your computer.)
It took some real trickery, but I managed to accomplish the same thing with YouTube and other embedded videos. (I can’t claim credit for any of this trickery — I cribbed it from others who’d faced similar frustrations in the past.) I’m rather astounded that it works at all, let alone as well as it does.
For instance…
Compare that to the same video as it appeared in this post from November, 2012. As with the full-size image, the video scales up or down to fit within the viewing window of whatever device you’re watching it with.
Other things small and large are different. The “drop caps” shown in this post look markedly different from those in the old design; the fonts have changed throughout; some things previously shown in the right sidebar now appear at the bottom (as a rather messy-looking footer); the site header has been completely remade; the site “tagline” — formerly Ridiculous Pursuits, Solemn Matters — has changed to the more open-ended Ridiculous Pursuits, Matters Solemn and Less So.
Some of those different things are going to change further. One problem I’ve found with this ultra-widescreen look, for instance, is that lines of text are actually too long to read comfortably. My proposed solution to that will return the sidebar to the right side… except on small screens, where it will automatically bump back to the bottom. When the sidebar displays on the right, the content itself should be easier to read.
I’ve also hunted around for a different audio-player thingumabob. The one I’ve been using for seven years still works fine, as far as it goes; however, it’s a pain to add songs to a playlist — and the playlists are limited in their behavior. (E.g., you couldn’t start playing in the middle.) I’m still experimenting with that, and expect it will make its debut sometime in the next few weeks.
Finally, there are a bunch of things for which the jury is still out. I’ve accepted (for now) most of the new theme’s default fonts (including typefaces, sizes, and colors); likewise, some of the default font treatments (as with the coloration of links) I’m still not excited about.
Any input you can provide (in comments or via email) will be gratefully noted and folded into the ultimate product.
In any case, thank you — as always — for visiting Running After My Hat.
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