The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Just kidding. Actually it's a nice refresh without forgetting the site's legacy. Great work, Spud!

If I was asked, hey BLT, why do you think Spud did that to the front page? I'd answer by saying, welp'sir, I think he's trying to accommodate multiple screen resolutions that are most popular around the world and parts of Canada so that the front page doesn't expand off the screen ever.

....am I warm?

Hey fluffy, I was wondering if with the Jukebox and facebook and the twitter feeds and such if anyone ever went to the front page any more. Thanks for noticing.

BLT, the site was designed back in the day when screens were much narrower, and Colin was trying to squeeze in three columns. As late as 2006, web designers were being advised to target 800x600 screens. Back in 2000, he was probably shooting for 640 x 480.

The front page was at a pretty narrow fixed resolution, and left justified. This meant that it crammed itself up against left hand side of modern browsers, leaving A LOT of white space. See the faq at http://www.songfight.org/faq.html for an example. Even though I have a predilection for leaving things alone, it was just getting uglier by the year to modern eyes, so I felt it was time to take some action.

Here's what I did, specifically:

1. Made the columns all a little wider, especially column three.
2. Pumped up the margins a bit so that the type could "breathe" a little more.
3. Centered the whole thing.
4. Added a background image.

It's still a static width. I have played around with a dynamic third column, with pretty good results. That may be the next move. Of course, I will have to rework the background image, because it's creating the white background with the gray staves, but I have ideas for that as well (pretty fun ones, I must say).

All in all, it's a little bit at time. My biggest fear is that once I start monkeying with it, the ideas will come out of the woodwork. It's OK, I know how to ignore them. On the other hand, fluffy will be glad to know that I "get" css now, and am starting to implement it in order to allow for more major upgrades in the future.

I like it, too. I think you could probably add even more breathing space for the type. Then again, I have a display width of 1280 and maybe we're shooting for something smaller here.

However! The web site is definitely lacking in web-2.0-ness, both in design and in features. This is a grave offence against all humanity and the sacred values of our founding fathers. For your convenience, here are some checklists to help rectify the situation:
http://msippey.tadalist.com/lists/public/155420
http://www.hypocritical.com/blog/2005/1 ... cklist.asp

Yours faithfully, etc.

People don't go to the front page? What's wrong with them? I go there first every time I come, often dozens of times a day. Looks nice, by the way.

I go to the front page twice a week as a reminder that I need to fucking work on more fucking music, and to see what news is on the sidebar (because I still haven't gotten around to adding that to the RSS feed that Spud abhors the existence of).

Ooh, one thing I'd change, though: the center column shouldn't be the same color as the outer background. It feels like there's a hole in the screen, and the songs are falling into them. The songs should be the central focus. Maybe make the outer background gray lighter?

My bookmark is the front page, if anyone cares, which I'm sure you do not.
And Spud, I know you like to keep it real.



....so do I.

The things I obsess on are:
- the music staves should be animated (a la google doodles) so that I can write my song right there on the site.
- the "next week's fight" sort of gets lost with no distinction apparent from all the "last" fights listed. Maybe reverse the color scheme. Or make it a red outline box with white background. That way "Next Week's Fight" would be jumping out.
- it's really pretty.

I think it is quite nice and I obsessively Visit it more than all my ex-boyfriend's Facebook pages.

Combined.
Perhaps I should write scorned woman song lyrics about it.
I could do it.....

ps. if it's actually my homepage, and not my own blog, does that mean I have an addiction?

I love you, RangerDen

way more than ten characters of "yay"