Just closed fourteen tickets, bringing the total number open down from 133 to 119. Ugh.

Several of them were RBY/GSC data errors, which doesn't surprise me; a lot of that data is from almost a decade ago now, before I expected this to ever be a real project and was copying numbers out of a Prima magazine. Much love to ciencia, who somehow keeps finding them.

Also closed several bugs relating to the breeding chain finder which are now obsoleted by its rewrite. It is, by the way, actually kinda cool now; no more errors, no more churning away for a half-hour, actually does the right thing with both final evolutions and eggs, etc. At least, as far as I've found. Give it a whirl and tell me how I screwed it up this time.

Other things were minor: removed a reference to /style/ from the main page template, fixed a layering issue with the suggestions dropdown, made move-only suggesting work, finally changed the Pokemon search display default to the table instead of a list, and made a couple move effect amendments.



Somewhat related to the lull in news is that, once again, I have decided I really hate my design and have been trying to do it over. I enjoy design, even if I'm not very good at it, and there's not really any better way to practice than to design something. Last time I was shooting for something more relevant than a generic blue and the opportunity to use more than one color, but it fell a bit flat as I discovered that my brown only really matches more brown. This time I have combined the last two approaches, reduced the amount of flat color, fixed some UI problems (like h1 and h2 looking almost the same, header links on the left not looking clickable..), and made the entire scheme a lot cleaner. Here's what I have ended up with:

http://stuff.veekun.com/screenshots/design/veekun5.png

Links are purple because they don't actually go anywhere, so they all count as visited. Normal links are blue but about that dark. There are some hover/focus effects not showing, unfortunately.

I'll probably just give up on IE this time and give them a dumbed-down simple style. Maybe I'll leave them with the brown and give everyone else the option to pick between the two. Not sure yet.

Thoughts?

Congrats on getting those tickets closed.

I like the improvements to the Breeding chain finder.

I've noticed a drop in the average amount of Ambipom at the bottom of the page so far after this update (however if this is just related to me being on at a time when very few people are on or not has yet to be seen or be able to be tested.)

The new design looks great for the most part (I've yet to see example pages other then the home page so it's hard to gauge my "rating" on the new design), the only thing that gets to me is the top-level header and how it doesn't really have a left side border for the brown background bar.

Edit: there's an odd shift to the right on the unedited post in the Edit Post page.

Colour-scheme wise, the new layout looks very nice. I think the aesthetics of it are fine, it'll just be a case of making sure the functionality stays as good.

As well as stuff ShinyMew mentioned, there's one thing I'm not sure on - are the blue lines with the Eevee icons meant to denote a previous news post? That's not entirely clear, but I'm guessing that's the aim of it since the line above the top news post is different and has a header.

Though like ShinyMew said, we kind of need to see a 'dex page example, and a forum post I suppose too, to give a full feedback on it. And no more shoutbox?

And that's Latin, if I'm not mistaken?

Looks Latin to me.

The colours are nice but the design itself seems a little... Sparse. Maybe I just like the snug look of the current design, but I do agree that the brown has to go. You should keep the shoutbox, in my opinion, and just allow registered users to post on it. Presumably it'll scale to fit everyone's resolutions. It just doesn't really look as "unique" as the current design.

Hm, as for IE... People still use that? I'd like you to try and keep as wide a functionality in all browsers as possible, though.

Randomly, that isn't my favourite picture of Eevee, either.

I'll be sure to check the breeding chains more closely when I actually start breeding some more Pokemon.

It's latin,

that's the generic filler text used by web developers for filling space on websites before actual content is put in.

That's not supposed to be an actual front page, just the basic layout and some horizontal rules. I have bits of other pages styled but not really finished enough to show off.

And what that picture of Eevee is super-awesome. :( Way better than the crappy one I've had now. Good god, I've been wanting to get rid of that for years.

Haha, I just thought his face looked kinda flat, but it's probably just me. Maybe it'll grow on me.

I'm going to miss the brown. It gave the site a kind of gentle, inviting vibe and really made it stand out compared to other sites. For the layout of the new site, the 'veekun' listed in the upper right corner seems a bit off. It should probably be raised a bit. All-in-all, though, it looks pretty good. Not a lot of wasted space, but not too cluttered, either. Very, very easy on the eyes, which I've come to expect from this site.

It stands out, but unfortunately it's hard to make *parts* of it stand out from other parts. :/ Even the background of this textbox is almost the same as the background for everything else. Ugh.

The 'veekun' is supposed to be overlapping the top border by a few pixels, so it looks like.. part of the border or rising out of it or something, I dunno. I thought it was cool. 8) So far everyone seems to think it's a bug but then agrees with me when I tell them it's intentional.

(And Gazmof: well, uh, Eevees have kinda flat faces. :( we are very sensitive about it and appreciate it if you don't point it out!!)

Hmm... well, perhaps if you just added like a row of pixels there. I dunno, it just seems like an optical illusion that the 'ee' and the 'u' are pushing at the border. Guess that just might be me, though.

Ya know, in the course of writing my story, I've somehow managed to bump Eevee up on my favorite Pokemon list. That list is always changing @_@; But that's off topic.

On the right hand border, I kinda think it'd be better to switch the order of Pokemon and Projects. It also looks a bit compressed... spacing it out a little could have good results, I think.

It's really hard to align it THAT exactly, given that the viewer could be using one of several fonts or could have changed the font size or etc.

I can only have so many projects going, but the list of Pokemon stuff keeps growing at an alarming rate. I'd rather push 'Pokemon' down a little bit than knock something I want to have more attention off the screen entirely. The gigantic Pokedex up top hopefully emphasizes that, yes, I do in fact have a Pokedex here.

Might space it out a bit more though.

I suggest off white instead of white. If you do use white, could you have it be default background color instead of hardcoded FFFFFF so I can have off white there without having to mess with firefox?

Oh, I'm sorry, Eevee! Actually that picture really is growing on me now. I should've known those adorable bundles of fur would wittle me down eventually. Now I gotta go train an Eevee to get it out of my system...

Part of me wants to stuff a bunch more things on the header banner but it would end up looking really cluttered and the simple look you've gone for is much better and easy on the eyes, like Goji said.

May or may not be related to the topic at hand, but when you do apply this new style is there any chance you'll be able to perhaps put a reference of whatever code this forum uses for formatting? Like listing how to bold tag and stuff (I'm assuming a b goes into the square brackets like all other forums, but still, it would seem more complete if you had a reference of them located somewhere. Heck, you probably already do and I didn't notice it).

It's really the little things that make a website look really awesome, so I'm really interested to see how you'll put a Pokedex entry together - may I suggest different coloured bars for each stat as opposed to the mixing of colours that you're using now? Whatever you decide, I'm confident that you'll produce a nice result. Just please don't use green on green...

Off-white: maybe.

Header: Yeah, with two big things framing it it's already a bit stuffed. I need somewhere to put the current user's name etc, too. Ugh.

bbcode: Forum needs a lot of love in general. That's one of the things it needs. :| Right now the tags are: b u i s h color url img code quote mono raw hr center.

stat bars: I almost did that at some point and then.. didn't. I think I even have a set of stat bar colors lying around somewhere still.

Hmm... I guess I wasn't consider other browsers and user settings.

Moving to Linux has been slightly enlightening; for example, there is no Helvetica or Verdana or Arial built in.

I've actually NEVER seen the Linux OS in action. What's it like?

http://stuff.veekun.com/screenshots/desktop/tekkanin-hardy.png
http://stuff.veekun.com/screenshots/desktop/tekkanin-gaems.png

Wow, that looks... bizarre. But then I imagine anything that's different to what I'm used to OS wise would look odd, I've only just moved across to Mac OS X, which is the only OS I've used besides Windows variants. Also... good song in the second screen.

I think the order of things on the links bar to the right looks okay as it is - generally I'd put the shorter list on top of the longer one, as you have done. The thing is that the top looks a bit empty - it looks like you've dragged the top of the site down so that Eevee's ears will fit in, but that's inherently created a lot more empty space in the center.

Though, having said that, it does look good to have Eevee going beyond those borders up top too, and would be kind of odd to have the ears cut off a little. I don't know. I wouldn't suggest moving the "Veekun" title across to the center either, as that would look too... corny. Or something. Not sure how to describe it.

Oh, I could skin the hell out of this; install a Windows theme, remove the top bar, replace the desktop panel in the bottom right with the system tray and clock, and tada Windows.

There was some ear-fitting involved, there, but for the most part I just wanted some healthy whitespace this time around.