Welcome to the New France Hopper Network

This has been long overdue, but it’s finally here. The site design has been pretty much the same for the last two years and back in 2011, it was one that worked. In 2011, my intentions for this site were quite a bit different. Originally, I meant for this site to serve as a collection of everything I do on the internet, importing my Facebook and Twitter posts, among other things. I’ve given up on that idea. Honestly, it was a pretty bad one. Now, save for the Instagram post, I intend for this blog to actually be an original one. No more Twitter and Facebook re-posts. No more epic failures that were then called “series”. After two years of not really knowing what the heck I wanted to do, it was time to get serious. One thing that was hampering that effort was the site design. It didn’t just suck, it couldn’t do what I want to now do. So, it was time to start over.

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This new design is all about content. The sidebar has been killed off entirely. So has the header. The front page is all about posts now. And, that hold true even on a mobile device. Since this new theme is built to be responsive, modern, and actually HTML5 compliant (although I do need to check that after the mods I made), the old mobile theme is gone. The site should now look a) great and b) consistent no matter what you’re accessing it from.

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Post are almost like they were on the old theme. However, they are no longer centered and the post area has shrunk from 1050px to 780px. Turns out not everyone has a 1080p monitor ^^; That said, posts are, again, designed to look great across devices, although I will admit I’m not a huge fan of the big white space on my desktop computer. That might change later, but for now, I can live with it. This almost means that yes, going forward pictures in posts will be smaller, but you can still click them for the “full-size” image.

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Pages looks pretty much the same as posts. They do appear to skip extra lines, which I am still debugging. While I do miss my <hr /> tags, I can see why this theme does support them.

So, say hello to a modified version of Pinbin as the site’s new design. Platform wasn’t a total bust, but it just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I also like designs that are built for the modern web, not the web of 2011. This theme actually allows me to edit the .css file, so I do plan to play around with it a fair bit. Case in point, the site is using some Web Fonts now.