15 Jun 2006

Skinning This Beast

I've finally gotten enough of the blog's skin done so that I have something to show for it. The skin is based loosely on Jaxon Rice's Developer skin. It's heavily modified, but that's the point, isn't it? It's been a very long time since I did any sort of web development for myself, and it turns out that I'm a bit out of date on the latest development trends. I think I've nailed most of them in terms of layout and such, but there's some tweaking to do. There's also several parts that I just haven't gotten around to yet, but I feel that there's enough that updating the site is worthwhile.

[Update]
I've been making incremental changes to the blog's skin all day, and I have to say, I don't know where I'd be without Jaxon's Developer skin. While the layout provided can be used as a nice starting point, the real value is that Jaxon has exposed (I believe) all of the available Community Server skinning elements, whether they are necessary or not. This makes it very easy to change the look and feel of any of the blog's elements without having to figure out what they are and where they go. For those of us who prefer hitting buttons and seeing the result to poring over documentation and rooting through whitepapers, this is tremendously useful.

It also speaks volumes to the quality of Community Server itself. I haven't yet run into something I wanted to implement that I could not do with a minimum of effort. While Jaxon's skin exposes all of that information to me, it was CS itself that provided the functionality. So far, the product seems to be extremely useable.