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Watch this space: New Fantranslation.org theme now live.

Submitted by kmeisthax on Tue, 10/15/2013 - 22:17 in News

I completed the visual redesign of the main site I was talking about a few days ago. The new theme, "MahoSpace", is much more visually distinct than the previous theme, "DoujinMart". For starters, we have this nice nebula background and some subtle starfield parallax effects... which only look good on a desktop or laptop with inertial touch scrolling. So the vast majority of users won't notice it, but I'm sure some designers I know will get a kick out of it.

The new theme is much better in the responsive department. The only thing which is kind of hacky/nonfunctional is the sidebar; I may wish to replace it with some kind of offcanvas navigation. But in the meantime, it's just a simple collapse/uncollapse toggle. Also there are a few other mobile usability issues - mostly related to increased graphical demands. As of this moment the site crashes on my iPod touch (4th gen), after spending a minute or so rendering the site horribly incorrectly. Given that it's an older device with only 256MB RAM and has already been denied future iOS updates, I'm not too concerned about that platform. My newer phone, a Virgin Mobile Supreme (really just a rebadged ZTE Sprint Vital...) with 768MB of RAM renders the site fine, albeit with a bit of touch latency which makes the website feel... weird. I'll have to perhaps disable the parallax layers on small screens or something.

My next step is to start exposing some long-running personal writing projects to the world. This will involve a separate theming job and a lot of content creation/injection/etc.

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