The Nineties have been calling

For the last three or four years, possibly more there’s been this niggling little noise in my head every time I looked at my own blog.

It’s not that it’s the most important site I look after, and I really only set it up to test ideas and post the occasional rant but it turns out the 1990’s were indeed calling, asking for the website back.

So here we are, in 2014 and I’ve finally embraced HTML5 and CSS3 for my own site two years after the big ‘5’ became a candidate recommendation of the W3C, and in the year it is set to become the recommended standard for websites across the board.

Hang on, what do you mean? Isn’t HTML5 the standard?

Amazingly although a large number of websites use HTML5 for their rendering now and it’s been a buzzword for at least five years it’s not actually a recommended standard yet. The W3C plan indicates that will happen this year.

This is the reason you hear website developers bemoaning the state of browser ‘X’ and device ‘Y’ rendering their latest creations. Or at least that’s why you heard those noises if you travel in circles frequented by web developers who like new toys.

So, off I went to themeforest and bought me a shiny responsive template, chopped up the source files and slapped it down on top of MODX without too much pain considering how long I put it off.

So far the result has been pleasing although I need to re-code the blog comments bits as they look horrible and there are some nasty kludges going on in the back room to get my old content to work in the new template.

Once I’ve fixed up the last couple of visual elements I suppose I’ll have to fix the validation of the old content as well but who really does that any more?

So here is it, my first post in the new template. It remains to be seen if it injects some enthusiasm so I start posting regularly again. Only time will tell.