don’t look, I’m naked
I’ve decided to expose my <body> on the internet in honor of Naked Day ’08 on April 9th. Thousands of other people are doing it, too, so I figured, why the heck not. You heard right: I’m stripping off my styles and going bare on the internet… that is, my website will be going bare on the internet, for all to see. What were YOU thinking? ;~p
My purpose in participating in Naked Day ’08 is three-fold:
- Advocate web standards This is the official reason for Naked Day and a cause that I am fully down with but am much too lazy to explain here, mainly cuz I do it all the time at work! That’s what a good link is for anyway, right?
- Celebrate good design Trying to pick matching link colors and backgrounds and fonts for a site is not fun for me as a non-designer, and the results always underwhelming. The industry has come a long way, baby, and now hundreds of beautiful, free templates are available for WordPress alone. The design I currently use is called Bluebird and it’s by Randa Clay. Many thanks, design people!
- Show off WordPress The code for the WordPress software that powers the blog is clean and standards compliant, meaning that even when you strip away the pretty work designers do, the site still makes sense.
WordPress makes participating in Naked Day ’08 super easy by providing a plugin that will automatically turn off my CSS template. The result should be a text-based, bare-bones-looking site. Not pretty but very usable…. at least I hope that’s what happens LoL… it’ll be a good experiment.
On the jeelago.net index page, which is not powered by WordPress, I manually strip-teased out the very minimal amount of CSS I’ve used to do things like align the text and set the width. Were my site more complicated and I more adept in php, I could use a script to strip, but that won’t be necessary this year.
09/04/2008 at 9:20 am Permalink
Honestly I’m having a hard time looking at my naked blog! It irks me. But I realized immediately a 4th aspect of removing the CSS: the content stands alone. It is an interesting experiment but I cannot wait for the end of this 24 hour period (midnight, tonight, Hawaii Standard Time) to have my pretty template back :~\