About

Der grüne Bereich is where I put ran­dom thoughts, notes, sketches and mostly pho­tos from my stay in Berlin.

I used a tem­plate called Min­in­at­ica, mod­i­fied to suit my needs.

At the bot­tom of the page I’ve added a fairly big sec­tion with news, recent com­ments list and other non-essential info. If you have javas­cripts enabled in your browser — you prob­ably have — this sec­tion is hid­den by default. Click­ing on ‘More info’ toggles its vis­ib­il­ity. This set­ting is saved in a cookie to make it persistent.

After the footer info sec­tion, there is the main nav­ig­a­tion bar: from there you can choose to browse cat­egor­ies of con­tent like A day in the life, the ‘journal’ part of the site, or Pho­to­book, the pic­ture gal­ler­ies. You can reach as well pages like this one or go to my old site S M F G.

One fea­ture I was really miss­ing from the ori­ginal tem­plate is the abil­ity to nav­ig­ate through posts without hav­ing to click on the back but­ton, so I added the ‘next’ and ‘prev’ links. Once you are in a post page, you can move to the next or pre­ced­ing one click­ing on the arrows at the far left and right just under the title header⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾.

The code

[This sec­tion is pretty tech­nical. You can skip it press­ing here.]

I spent a good three months pain­fully craft­ing pixel per pixel a new web site, after my two-year-and-two-months-long counter-clockwise trip around the World. The idea was to have a reg­u­lar web­log sec­tion, with little to zero pho­tos, and a graph­ic­ally dif­fer­ent media sec­tion, show­cas­ing my pictures.

For those who know me, it would have been com­pletely em based, and with a rig­or­ous ver­tical tempo as well as a hori­zontal grid. Actu­ally most of the time was spent try­ing to make Fire­fox, Opera and Chrome — under both GNU/Linux and MS Win­dows — behave the same with the sub-pixel approx­im­a­tions⁽³⁾. As even­tu­ally I real­ised, it was a too ambi­tious pro­ject, and I star­ted com­pletely in the wrong way: try­ing to modify a tem­plate to suit my needs. I left the pro­ject when — instead of leav­ing for a new trip — I star­ted work­ing again as an archi­tect, in Janu­ary 2011.

In autumn 2011 I moved to Ber­lin, and I imme­di­ately felt the urge to wander the inter­webs again. Unfor­tu­nately, the lack of an Inter­net con­nec­tion in the flat I am rent­ing⁽⁴⁾.

For these reas­ons, and for the lack of time, I went for a nice tem­plate and made a few lots of modi­fic­a­tions, not­ably the font and the one-column-centered lay­out. I am pulling the fonts you are see­ing (the beau­ti­ful «Deli­cious» fam­ily by Jos Buivenga—except for the «bold-italic» that I wouldn’t be using in any case — , and the hap­pily baroque⁽⁵⁾ «Mutlu Orna­mental» by Gazoz) from my own server, and this is the reason for that annoy­ing delay when you open a new page. Actu­ally after the first time they should be cached in your com­puter, so the page would load faster, but your mileage may vary⁽⁶⁾.

But before everything else I needed a devel­op­ing environment.

[to be continued …]

1. This is pre­cisely one of the things that I am not sat­is­fied with: one should click left for ‘next’ and right for ‘pre­vi­ous’. This is kinda counter-intuitive, but it is con­sist­ent with the way pic­tures are shown on the front page slider. That slider is the fea­ture I chose this tem­plate for, so I guess I should live with it. ^
2. And no, you can’t find them here, because this one is not a chro­no­lo­gical post entry, but a static page. Pages live on a hier­arch­ical struc­ture of their own. :-)  ^
3. Of course I did not even try to make that other browser work. Some­times I was open­ing a page, though, and it looked so 1995 :-)  ^
4. Well, this is not com­pletely true, but let’s say the con­nec­tion I some­times get is so slow that I have to check my mail with alpine and surf with lynx. Not really prac­tical for the 2011’s web. ^
5. Pun inten­ded. ^
6. «Chi bello vuole appar­ire, un poco deve sof­frire.» ^