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contents/articles/h3rald-83.html

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-----
title: "H3RALD.com v8.3 Released"
content-type: article
subtitle: "A new minimalist design, powered by Twitter Bootstrap"
timestamp: 1356648094
tags: "website|webdevelopment"
-----

		<section class="section">
<p>One of the many things that really bothered me about my web site was the fact that it didn&#8217;t look good on my iPhone, or any small screen for that matter.</p>
<p>Years ago I <a href="http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/">read about</a> responsive web design, media queries, etc., but I never had the will or the time to dive into the subject. Then <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/">Twitter Bootstrap</a> came out, and it changed <em>everything</em>.</p>
<p>Not only Bootstrap provides a very solid <span class="caps">HTML</span> boilerplate and grid system, it also comes with some very nice and complete styles for every <span class="caps">HTML</span> element, a few Javascript-enhanced UI components, and  best of all it is fully responsive.</p>

<section class="section">
<header><h1 id="h_1" class="toc">Getting to know Bootstrap & its CSS wizardry</h1></header>
<p>Redesigning H3RALD.com using Twitter Bootstrap turned out to be fairly easy. I headed up to the <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/customize.html">Customize and Download</a> page and set a few variables like the font to use (the beautiful <a href="http://aldusleaf.org/crimson.php">Crimson text</a>), the link color and so on, and downloaded the lot.</p>
<p>I more or less completely forgot about my old <span class="caps">CSS</span> stylesheets and went with Bootstrap all the way. I was happy with a lot of the defaults, but I had to add a few rules and overrides for:</p>
<ul>
	<li>headings</li>
	<li>line heights</li>
	<li>A few custom classes I use extensively, like add a <code>text-align: justify;</code> for the <code>hyphenate</code> class.</li>
</ul>
<p>Now, one of the cool things of Bootstrap is that it comes with smart defaults, and that it lets you add specific features to elements simply by adding a <span class="caps">CSS</span> class to them. Take a look at how <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#buttons">buttons</a> are constructed, for instance. Normal button? Sure:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div class="code">
<pre>
<code>
&lt;button class="btn"&gt;Click Me!&lt;/button&gt;
</code>
</pre>
</div>
<p></td><td><button class="btn">Click Me!</button></td></p>
</tr>
</table>
<p>That&#8217;s grey with black text. Boring. Want it red? Sure, add the <code>.btn-danger</code> class:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div class="code">
<pre>
<code>
&lt;button class="btn btn-danger"&gt;Click Me!&lt;/button&gt;
</code>
</pre>
</div>
<p></td><td><button class="btn btn-danger">Click Me!</button></td></p>
</tr>
</table>
<p>Too big? No problem, make it smaller with <code>.btn-sm</code>, so we have:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div class="code">
<pre>
<code>
&lt;button class="btn btn-danger btn-small"&gt;Click Me!&lt;/button&gt;
</code>
</pre>
</div>
<p></td><td><button class="btn btn-danger btn-small">Click Me!</button></td></p>
</tr>
</table>
<p>Wouldn&#8217;t it be nice to have a nice icon in it? Add an empty <code>&lt;i&gt;</code> element with a suitable class and there you have a nice <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/base-css.html#icons">Glyphicon</a> before the button text (or you can use other icon fonts, like <a href="http://fontawesome.io/">FontAwesome</a>).</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<div class="code">
<pre>
<code>
&lt;button class="btn btn-danger btn-sm"&gt;&lt;i class="fa fa-check"&gt;&lt;/i&gt; Click Me!&lt;/button&gt;
</code>
</pre>
</div>
<p></td><td><button class="btn btn-danger btn-sm"><i class="fa fa-check"></i> Click Me!</button></td></p>
</tr>
</table>
<p>&#8230;You get the picture. And it works surprisingly well &#8212; if you embrace its philosophy, that is. Just like Rails &amp; Co.: an <em>opinionated</em> framework.</p>
<p>The only thing that bugged me about all this was that by adding smart <span class="caps">CSS</span> classes to elements you&#8217;re actually specifying how something looks like by polluting <span class="caps">HTML</span> code. Granted, if your stylesheet doesn&#8217;t include a <code>.btn-inverse</code> your buttons won&#8217;t automagically become black, but you know what I mean. Although in a very nice way, by following Bootstrap&#8217;s way of doing things you are no longer separating content from presentation. And in the next six months, when I&#8217;ll ditch Bootstrap for something better, all the previews of the code snippets above won&#8217;t work unless I keep using the Bootstrap stylesheet or at least some of its button classes.</p>
<p>The real problems arise for the stylesheets provided for general elements. By default, Bootstrap styles tables with no borders or colors. What if I wanted just ordinary tables to be striped and bordered? Sure, I can add the <code>.table-striped</code> and <code>.table-bordered</code> classes to all tables, and that&#8217;s it. In <span class="caps">EVERY</span> table. Or of course undo bootstrap&#8217;s magic by overriding the <span class="caps">CSS</span> rules for ordinary tables, to include the rules specified for <code>.table-striped</code> and <code>.table-bordered</code>. Copy &amp; paste someone else&#8217;s code? Not nice.</p>
<p>Luckily, using <a href="http://sass-lang.com/"><span class="caps">SASS</span></a> finally paid off, and here&#8217;s how to do it in a nice and tidy way:</p>
  
<div class="code">
<pre>
<code>
@import "_bootstrap.scss"; 
/* The bootstrap stylesheet - just changed its extension and prepended an underscore, nothing more */

table {
  @extend .table;
  @extend .table-striped;
  @extend .table-bordered;
}
</code>
</pre>
</div>
<p>There you go. All tables (ordinary <code>&lt;table&gt;</code> elements with no silly classes attached) are now bordered and striped.</p>

</section>


<section class="section">
<header><h1 id="h_2" class="toc">Header & navigation bar</h1></header>
<p>As far as the main site header goes, I decided to use the same one for all pages, containing:</p>
<ul>
	<li>The site logo</li>
	<li>The search input box (powered by <a href="http://www.google.com/cse/">Google Custom Search Engine</a></li>
	<li>A <em>responsive</em> navigation bar with links to all the main sections of the site</li>
</ul>
<p>As far as the navigation bar goes, that&#8217;s pure Bootstrap goodness, nothing new there (except the serif font), <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html#navbar">look it up</a>.</p>
<p>For the logo&#8230; Well, I had this nice plan of using just plain <span class="caps">CSS</span> and web fonts to make it (hell, it&#8217;s basically the word &#8220;H3RALD&#8221;, with the 3 slightly bigger and moved a bit). It worked mostly fine (in webkit browser and in Opera), but Firefox didn&#8217;t like it much, and IE&#8230; well, some old versions of IE don&#8217;t play nice with web fonts, so I decided to make a nice <span class="caps">PNG</span> image and stick it there instead. Less hassle, it works everywhere, job done.</p>
<p>The search input box was a bit more of a challenge. I read up on the new <a href="https://developers.google.com/custom-search/docs/element">Custom Search Element Control <span class="caps">API</span></a>, discovered that Google decided that web designers don&#8217;t know Javascript or <span class="caps">CSS</span> nowadays and proposed a new <span class="caps">API</span> that has numerous advantages like:</p>
<blockquote>
<ul>
	<li>Easy to use syntax—no JavaScript knowledge required.</li>
	<li>Custom Search elements (search boxes and results pages) are rendered based on settings stored on the <span class="caps">CSE</span> servers (along with any client-side customization). Server-side changes don&#8217;t require you to copy and paste any new code into your site<br />
</blockquote></li>
</ul>
<p>Thanks Google. Now every time I change my stylesheet I have to remember to go back to your page and change the link colors etc. And if I decide to hide the page <span class="caps">URL</span> underneath the link in the results? I can&#8217;t. And that&#8217;s why I decided to reverse engineer their <span class="caps">CSS</span> and provide my overrides. Nasty, but at least I have some control! They&#8217;re all <a href="https://github.com/h3rald/h3rald/blob/master/content/styles/_vendor.scss">here</a>, if you are curious.</p>

</section>

<section class="section">
<header><h1 id="h_3" class="toc">Other minor changes & tweaks</h1></header>
<p>Other changes from the previous design were relatively minimal:</p>
<ul>
	<li>No more newspaper-style home page with five columns, two will suffice.</li>
	<li>A brand new <a href="/tags/">Tags</a> page, listing&#8230; well, all the site tags that were previously in the <a href="/archives/">Archives</a> pages (now only listing articles by month of publication)</li>
	<li>No more Links page. No need for it.</li>
	<li>A new, minimalist <a href="/contact/">Contact</a> page, featuring some of the nice <a href="http://zocial.smcllns.com/">Zocial</a> font icons.</li>
	<li>No more social buttons on pages. If you use social networks like Twitter, Facebook or Google+ you already know how to share items using bookmarklets or browser extensions. No need to plague my web site with their nasty buttons, badges, ribbons &amp; alike.</li>
	<li>No ads! I have a full-time job, my site uses free and open source technologies, and I write because I like to do so, not to make money. And I can afford the few bucks necessary to pay the hosting provider. That&#8217;s why there are NO <span class="caps">ADS</span> on H3RALD.com anymore <sup>(*)</sup>.</li>
</ul>
<p><sup>(*)</sup>: For now, that is. Then I&#8217;ll probably change my mind, but until then enjoy the true no-ads experience!</p>

</section>

</section>