BtR's Blog

This has been a difficult month for me, so I apologize for the delay in my replies to support requests. Things are (almost) back to normal now, so I’ back at work now.

First of all, I issued just now a minor update to Krypton: in the “Gallery” theme and option, submenus arrows were hidden. I changed this using darker arrows which are still unobtrusive but more coherent with the rest of the design. If you purchased Krypton, you should receive shortly an e-mail with a new download link.

Second, there’s a new design in the works. I can’t provide a release date yet, but most of the stuff is done. It will be a white-background theme with particular attention to typography.

There’s a debate about the position of the sitemenu: usually it’s placed below the header, but with my recent themes I decided to put it on top of the page. Someone likes it, someone doesn’t, it’s a matter of taste. With a tall header I understand that it may be less usable, but still I like it where it is in Hydrogen and Krypton for a number of other reasons. If you think the header is too tall for your taste, just remember that you can make it shorter via Code Injection, it’s very easy. Examples:

Hydrogen:

Krypton:

As usual, feature requests and feedback are always welcome.

Due to personal reasons, support will be unavailable for this whole week.

I’ll replay to all the emails starting from Monday, 21st Jan. Thank you for your understanding.

Buy two designs, get one free!

To celebrate Christmas holidays, BehindTheRabbit offers a time-limited special discount on all of its designs. If you buy two or more, one is free.

The $9.90 discount will be applied automatically when three items or more are added to the cart. A nice chance to complete your collection!

This offer ends on December 31st, 2012.

Krypton is my latest design for Sandvox 2 (from now on all new designs from BehindTheRabbit will require Sandvox 2.7, so check that your version of Sandvox is up-to-date!).

It’s the “dark companion” of Hydrogen, the same way Grafite is to Carbone: they share the same width and proportions, they both rely almost exclusively on CSS for their look and for both of them pictures can be quite large (up to 900px on pages with no sidebar), a feature that photographers and artists will surely like.

Krypton comes in three basic variations: a “default” one with right sidebar; a “Left Sidebar” variation (guess what: it has the sidebar on the left); and a “Gallery” variation.

The latter has a different layout whenever navigation arrows are selected. If you need to setup a photo gallery and you want your pictures to be displayed in their own minimalistic layout, this is the easiest way to do so: most of the times, in fact, photo albums use navigation arrows while other pages usually have text or no navigation.

These three variations will serve 90% of users right out of the box.

For the first time, though, I’m introducing a new way of customizing your design: there’s some ready-made code included in the package that you just need to activate. No knowledge of CSS is required: just choose the option or options you want to activate, write them into one easy line of code and paste it into the right place (full instructions are on Krypton’s page).

This is an easy way to obtain a fine-grain control over your website or even single pages. For example, you can have in the same site one page with left sidebar, another with the “Gallery” layout, a third one with both.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank Troy Cross: his website www.tscross.com pushes Grafite a lot over the constraints I though it had; exchanging ideas with him while we were both working at our projects (we both were trying to transfer some Hydrogen features – he to his website, I to Krypton) has been helpful and inspiring. Check out his amazing photos too!

Carbone comes in six colors, all with the sidebar placed on the left side of the page. There’s an extra design with the sidebar placed on the right side, but the only color available is the default one (orange). This choice was made to keep things as simple as possile for people who don’t like to work with code and just want some out-of-the-box options.

Of course you can tweak (via Code Injection) your “right sidebar” design and change both the header and the color of links to mimic any of the left-sidebar provided designs; nevertheless, a common request is to do the opposite: to move the sidebar to the right on a variation design.

If you want to do this, here is the code:

Despite its simple look, Hydrogen’s layout is slightly more complex than usual: for example, sitemenu is on top and the title is contained inside a box with text aligned at its bottom. One downside in this layout is that the banner is bound to the “title” element; this means that if you hide the title, your custom banner (if you have one) will be hidden as well.

Luckily, we can solve this problem easily with just one line of code, hiding title’s content via Site Code Injection. Here’s how:

1. Select “Site Code Injection…” from the “Edit” menu.
2. Select the “Style Sheet” tab
3. Paste this code:

Now select a different page to see the result (the change isn’t applied “live”).

From now on, your title text is hidden (delete this line if you want to see or edit it again), but your custom banner is kept visible.

After a long break, I’m back at work on Sandvox (thanks to an impressive blizzard that hit Rome this week, keeping me at home for many days in a row…).

The long delay was due to my choice of going back to the drawing board: first of all Sandvox 2 is pretty different from Sandvox 1 (mostly in terms of elasticity) and it would be a pity not to consider this increased power. Second, the web has changed a lot in these two years and I had to reconsider a few things. My first design for Sandvox 2 is the blueprint for all following designs, so it needed some particular care. But here we are now, the wait is over.

Hydrogen is – apparently – pretty basic (white background, sans-serif font, just a dark-grey header): don’t get fooled, the devil is in the details. I focused on whitespace, typography, compatibility, flexibility and, mostly, giving content the best presentation possible. Effects (shadows, transitions…) are present but in the most unobtrusive way. This design has to be modern, not to say “look at me, I’m so modern”.

As it is, it’s good for almost anything. Images in single pages with no sidebar are displayed at 900px of width, much more than the usual 640px default, so it’s very good for photography. But I think that its readability makes it a very good start for bloggers too.

But if you have special needs and you know some CSS I think you’ll have a lot of fun customizing it with some code. Since its layout is so simple, few lines will let you change almost anything very easily (colors, headers, backgrounds, typography… it’s like a blank canvas). Soon I’ll post more examples about this in the blog.

In few words, I’m pretty happy about it and I hope you will enjoy it too.

For all its features (which are a lot), take a look at its page.

In an HTML page you can use the <blockquote> tag to give emphasis to a chunk of text: most of the times it is used to display a block of quoted text.

Sandvox 2.1 added a new blockquote object that does just this: it adds a blockquote tag to your page. This block of text is displayed by default as slightly indented text.

All my current designs don’t specify any particular formatting for blockquotes, so the use of this object may be somehow frustrating. I plan to add support for this feature with future updates but – in the meantime – you can add some spice to your blockquotes with few lines of code (general instructions on how to use code injection are here, as usual).

Here are few examples but, of course, you can mix code as you wish and try different combinations.

Example 1

Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Light gray background with a left, thick border. The code: – Read more »

Karelia just released Sandvox 2.5 (both via their website and the Mac App Store) with a bunch of new features. Among them:

• Full Lion support: full screen app, auto-save, versions
• A new slide-show object with automatic transitions (very nice and useful for a richer experience – try it with some creativity!)
• Spanish and Italian (yeah!) localization

Sandvox 2.5 requires MacOS X 10.6 or superior. As usual, Sandvox is free for websites up to 5 pages, so there’s no reason not to give it a try.

I released just now a small but critical update to all my themes. With one of the previous updates I broke the “Gallery” feature in Explorer.

The Gallery is that option you can select in photo albums to show up a lightbox slide show instead of redirecting the visitor to single photo pages (see picture).

The update has been sent via e-mail to all the customers who didn’t unsubscribe, so you should receive it in your mailbox in a matter of minutes.

Anyway, as far as I understand, this option is rarely used so most of your websites are safe.