a bit of a changeup

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You're looking at a screenshot from my Nexus 7, Google's 7" reference Android tablet. It's a screenshot of my blog with the tablet in its default portrait orientation.

I changed my blog's default layout from 'magazine' to 'classic' because 'classic' displays best on the tablet. In magazine mode the blog crammed everything onto the page, regardless of its orientation. It made it very difficult to read and navagate. If you selected a story, it made it very hard to scroll up the story. If I may borrow a phrase and mangle it a bit, magazine layout is very finger unfriendly, while classic isn't. This layout also has the added benefit of showing the blog's navigation bar off to the right. There's just a smidge of irony in this selection of classic, as it was never originally designed for touch in mind, but for an earlier time on the web when simplicity was held in higher regard.

I changed up the color a bit from tan to green. It's spring bordering on summer here in central Florida, and we've started to receive a bit of rain. All the plant growth we haven't bulldozed down is coming out in riotous hues of green. Besides, if Picasso can have his rose and blue periods, then I can have my green-as-summer period.

As a nod to a bit of skeuomorphism I changed some of the fonts (blog description and entry title) to Google's 'coming soon' font, which you can find it on the design tool within Blogger itself. I kind of like the pseudo hand-written printed look, like comments across the top edge of old photos and polaroids.

And just to show that every rose has its thorn, there's a "feature" between the Android version of Google and Blogger's implementation of this layout. The labeling across the top that shows "Classic Flipcard Magazine..." won't display on the Nexus 7 (or Firefox for Android, for that matter). I guess somebody is checking the agent string on Google's side and disabling the menu if it's coming from a tablet, but I'll be damned to explain why they should bother. But if you're reading this on a regular machine (notebook, laptop, desktop) and you see the menu then you can select the old magazine layout and continue on.

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