Spring Cleaning

Salaamun ’ala man ittaba’ al-Huda.

Eid Mubarak, everyone. Do you notice anything different about my blog today?

Totally. I did a total redesign of my blog. I even deleted all my previous posts. In the spirit of Eid when people were busy doing house-cleaning, I decided to do some spring cleaning on my blog. My previous posts— some are good but a great deal of them are junk. So, after making a backup, I cleared my blog. Don’t worry, they will be posted back on this blog — once I edited them. :)

More design rationale after the jump!

What’s with the redesign?

It’s nothing much, though. I'm finishing my school life this year so I want my blog to have that essence of maturity— prepared for my post-school posts. The previous design was a bit “grungish” and it did reflect my inner-self back in my junior secondary days. Things change, so do I, and so do my inner-self. I want something clean. I want to return to my fitrah. Innallah jamil yuhibbul jamal, says Prophet Muhammad (saas). Clean and elegant web design is, IMO, the Muslim way compared to grunge design. However, a li’l “Islamic grunge” design won’t hurt, right? Hehe…

Design notes for the 1337 @ 933K community

The header uses a background image of the lallang image shot by me at Pulau Indah a few months ago. I’m a bit lazy right now to put in the lens info but if you need it just leave a comment or PM me. The header logo is of the the Helvetica family; the a2i | vibes uses the Bold typeface while the slogan underneath uses the Light typeface. And right, that’s me beside the logo. Rafi’ shot the picture when I gave my Arabic speech on the closing night of Mahrajan Thaqafi.

The kawaii little icons on the right of my sidebar are from the Fugue Icons set, which can be downloaded from the Pinvoke website. The hover effect of the search bar is achieved by using some CSS.

For the body copy, the font size is set to 1 em (roughly 16 px on most modern browsers). The post copy is of the Helvetica Neue typeface at 1.125 em (roughly 18 pts at normal rendering) with the line height of 1.5 ems. To maintain the vertical rhythm, the margins of the <p> element is also set to 1.5 ems. For those who don’t have the Helvetica Neue typeface, the fall-backs are Helvetica, followed by Arial then the generic sans-serif. The post title is of the elegant Times New Roman (oh I miss this font!) typeface, set at 3 ems. The post-date and the by-line are set to Verdana typeface at 0.875 ems.

Due to the redesign, I discovered that Blogger has implemented the "Read more" function, alhamdulillah!

Why obliterate all posts? I wanna read ’em!

A da'ie cannot show his bad side to his mad'u. Not to be a hypocrite, but some things are better left secret. My previous posts, especially prior to 2008, contain a lot of junk. I will repost them eventually (insyaAllah), as I have saved all of them to my laptop. The only thing is, they will be edited. Bad words will be removed or striked out, Malay posts will be translated into English and I will put some commentary on posts that I think I should. For example, I was really mad at my class one day in 2007 so I blurted all of it in my blog. When I'm going to repost that, I will put some commentary saying that “this is not what a Muslim should do when he's angry!” Lol, srsly. So, this will be my post-SPM project!

That’s it folks. I’ve explained the rationale of the design and the semantics. So if you have any more questions unanswered, let me know in the comments.

And let me know what you think about my design, too!

Wassalam.

UPDATE: The design is now centred after Qubezo's advice.