New Look & Some Changes to MuscleHack.com

by Mark McManus on November 10, 2008

Change You Can Believe In So, what do you think of the new look? It’s not the only change coming, read on.

Firstly, it’s best viewed with Firefox or Google Chrome. Things are a little strange looking when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, like all the text being center-aligned. I made the switch away from IE a long time ago because of issues like that.

It was designed by Hector Beltran, who put a hell of a lot of effort into this. He took my suggestions and made a few of his own to produce what you see now. Hector, thank you!

He is available to work on graphic design, XHTML and CSS hand coding, so if any of you are interested in having some work done, you can contact him at hbvtux@estilo-latino.com .

I’ll probably make some minor amendments in the coming days too and am open to suggestions.

Changes & A New Newsletter Coming

I will no longer be sending an email to everyone on the list every time an article is published. Some subscribers were unsubscribing because they already have the RSS feed, an email reminder was therefore unnecessary. That’s a fair point so I’ve taken the following action…

The mailing list will now be used for a once-weekly MuscleHack Newsletter of EXCLUSIVE content. This content will NOT be a duplication of what appears on the site, you’ll want to stay subscribed for that.

If you’re someone who has unsubscribed but wants the new Newsletter, you’ll need to sign up again by popping your email address into the box at the top left of the screen.

Now, if you still want to get the articles emailed to you, you can have them. In fact, these emails will contain the FULL article as opposed to a short excerpt, which was previously the case.

If you want to receive the full articles in your inbox, you need to enter your email address below. Please do so now:

Articles haven’t been as regular as usual but all will be back to normal now. If you have any particular issues you’d like me to cover, or ideas about other services MuscleHack could offer, you can go ahead and give me suggestions below.

Let me take the time to thank you all for your continued support, it’s HIGHLY appreciated!

Your buddy,

Mark McManus

{ 10 comments }

1 Rob November 10, 2008 at 7:34 pm: Well done on the new site design, Mark! It looks great. Thanks also for putting so much of your time and effort into providing quality information.
2 Rch November 11, 2008 at 2:59 am: What’s up with the mushroom cloud? A non sequitor and an inappropriate one at that.
3 Mark McManus November 11, 2008 at 6:03 am: Thanks Rob,
@ Rch – I didn’t even notice it to be honest.
4 g November 11, 2008 at 10:22 am: Hello, the – and the +:

- Miss the old background (much more 2.0)
- Recent-Random-Best : too many post titles. They should at least be at the same side.
- I really feel (carb) sandwiched with your posts in the middle of overcrowded columns.
- images look “older” than before

- Comments section is fantastic
- Updates box and Menu are great
5 Daan November 28, 2008 at 1:49 pm: I totally dig the new look. There’s just this thing where the linespacing increases when you include a smiley (e.g. ). It’s in the comments but also in your posts.
6 Mark McManus November 28, 2008 at 4:27 pm: Thanks Daan, I think it’s much better too.
I don’t mind the line spacing thing, it’s no big deal.
Mark
7 Leo December 3, 2008 at 2:26 pm: To fix the centered text in Ie. simly add text-align:left; to your #content id in your stylesheet.

currently:
#content { width: 530px;
margin: 30px 305px 0 165px;
}

becomes:
#content { width: 530px;
margin: 30px 305px 0 165px;
text-align:left;
}
8 Mark McManus December 3, 2008 at 7:19 pm: Thanks Leo.
I took your advice and it looks good in IE now. Well apart from the big header text in the right sidebar and the search bar being in the middle of the header, lol.
Cheers,
Mark.
9 Leo December 12, 2008 at 11:22 am: OK,

I couldn’t go through the whole stylesheet to modify each style individually … but if you add the following to the end (important to be at the end) of it it should fix everything: title size in sidebar, search box and search button (breaks under search box in ie7).

.left-content h1,.left-content h2{ font-size:1.8em; }
#search-form input{ padding:0; }
#search-form #search-input{ padding:5px 0 0 10px; width:195px; }
#searchform-cont{ width:280px; margin:20px 0 0 580px; }
#search-submit{ float:left; width:25px; height:25px; }

Test it in both IE7 and FFox I could only work with remote files.
To make your titles bigger increase the font size to 2 or 2.2 em;
To lower the box vertically in the middle of the banner, increase the 20px to 35px or 40px in margin:20px 0 0 580px

If your designer likes to keep things ‘clean’ you may also want to have him put these where they belong if he has styles for them already defined.

Cheers

Leo
10 Mark McManus December 12, 2008 at 11:35 am: Thanks Leo, the guy that designed it is working on these changes at the moment.
I took a copy of what you said in case further amendments are needed.
Thanks!