About this site's lack of design: Yes, it's supposed to look this way — I'm helping create a new sandbox theme for WordPress (see it on GitHub).

Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Contest: Sidebar Redux

From the nice folks who brought you “The Old Tech­nol­ogy Give­away” (me) comes a new con­test, with use­ful prizes!

Pre­sent­ing: Side­bar Redesign

Objec­tives: Redesign and enhance the side­bar for this site (Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter), in keep­ing with the exist­ing look and feel.

Prizes: The Grand Prize win­ner will receive 10 Type­Pad 20% Life­time Dis­count codes, as well as your name cred­ited in the “About” page of this site, a link to your site in the “Exter­nal” col­umn, and a credit in this site’s source. First Run­ner Up and Sec­ond Run­ner Up will each receive 5 Type­Pad 20% Life­time Dis­count codes.

Require­ments: If you plan to sub­mit a work­ing demo, it should val­i­date as XHTML 1.0 (Tran­si­tional or Strict), and the CSS should val­i­date and work prop­erly in the fol­low­ing browsers: IE5/Mac, IE6/PC, Mozilla (and related browsers), Safari. All designs must work well in the 3 dif­fer­ent color schemes of this site. Things I’d like are a recent com­ments list and a “cur­rently enjoy­ing” link list, but those are just ideas. Feel free to come up with ideas for its con­tent as well (this is also an oppor­tu­nity to shape a small part of the reg­u­lar con­tent of this site). Do not feel oblig­ated to fit your design into the cur­rent side­bar dimen­sions: there is no restric­tion on size, but it should fit visu­ally with the rest of the site design and layout.

Sub­mis­sions: Post a link to your entry in the Com­ments of this post, in one of the fol­low­ing for­mats: JPG, GIF, PNG, PSD, or an actual work­ing demo of your design.

Dead­line: The Type­Pad 20% Life­time Dis­count codes expire Novem­ber 30th, 2003, so we will receive entries through 11:59pm EST on August 31th, 2003. The win­ners will be announced on or before Sep­tem­ber 30th, 2003. This will give the win­ners enough time to fig­ure out how they will use their spoils.

More prizes may be added before the con­test is over, and I’m cer­tainly open to dona­tions to the prize pool.

Ques­tions? Email me.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Wednesday, August 13th, 2003.

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6 comments on “Contest: Sidebar Redux”

  1. Posted by vlad on Thursday, August 14th, 2003.

    i actu­ally like the side­bar right now. it’s unclut­tered and dis­plays all the infor­ma­tion it needs to. on the other hand it’d be inter­est­ing to see what oth­ers can do with it…

  2. Posted by Dan R. on Friday, August 15th, 2003.

    Thanks for say­ing so Vlad — I have con­sid­ered that as a rea­son I’ve not been able to come up with any­thing I like bet­ter, but I can’t help think­ing that it might just be that I’ve run out of inspiration ;-)

    I’m very inter­ested to see what might come of this, and I hope the word starts to spread soon!

  3. Posted by Kjell on Friday, August 29th, 2003.

    Click my name to see the entry I came up with for the side­bar con­test — I got kinda swamped right in the mid­dle and fin­ished it with only a few visual orna­men­ta­tions, but spent more of my time engi­neer­ing a MT back­end to the whole thing, so do you use MT? It also uses php, and so if you don’t use either of those you are out of luck with the linkblog. But I just changed the col­ors slightly, added some sep­a­ra­tion (gamma issues with mac vs pc mon­i­tors tweak the side­bar slightly depending).

    But on the design issue I though it would look best really sim­ple, so I didn’t change it much. I axed the gray back­ground color and added some bor­ders to the sides basi­cally. I was debat­ing keep­ing the gray back­ground and mak­ing the bor­ders match the users cho­sen stylesheet, but never got to it.

  4. Posted by Hadley on Saturday, August 30th, 2003.

    Hi! I’ve had a bit of a go (just so you have more than one entry :) But it’s far too late and I’m not in a very inspired mode. I’ve come up with a

    cou­ple of ideas (much more evo­lu­tion­ary than rev­o­lu­tion­ary). I’m not very sat­is­fied with it, but I hope it might spark some inspi­ra­tion for you! I think my favourite thing is includ­ing books and music in the cur­rently enjoy­ing section.

    I’ve got the html and css I used to gen­er­ate them, but its all a bit of a mess, and I’d be more than happy to email it to you.

    Hadley

  5. Posted by Brad Smith on Sunday, August 31st, 2003.

    Here’s my lit­tle shot at the side­bar design. It is more evo­lu­tion­ary than any­thing, and things could be rearranged as nec­es­sary. It’s not a full demo (as in you can’t eas­ily click around the demo), but you can get the idea.

  6. Posted by Dan on Monday, September 1st, 2003.

    Thanks to every­one who sub­mit­ted a design — the way it worked out, all three of you will receive a prize (Grand Prize, 1st and 2nd runners-up) which means that in this con­test, every­one is truly a winner.

    As I just returned from my long week­end in Tampa (sun, fun, singing, drink­ing, up till 9am this morn­ing, etc.) I will review the sub­mis­sions and post the results tomor­row. Each of you will be noti­fied per­son­ally via email, and I’ll include your Type­Pad dis­count codes along with your final ranking.

    Thanks for par­tic­i­pat­ing — this has been a fun experiment! :-)