I’ll be on vacation until August 31st, so support is suspended for around 1 month.

See you in September!

After three long days of restless drawing and coding, I’m happy to announce that the new version of BehindTheRabbit’s website is now officially online.

My main goal was to redesign just the home page to add some more informations and an easier access to the blog, but I immediately realized that a total redesign was needed. I’m quite satisfied with the result, I hope you will be too.

Few lines to explain what’s going on here and why there’s no update since a while.

First of all, after a couple of really tough years (I think that my main job – psychotherapist – is a strong indicator of economical crisis and of some massive culture phoenomenons and these last years have been really particular for both situations; but that’s another story) I’m quite busy now with my profession. Which is good news. For me, at least. I’m not dropping web design but, of course, priority goes to paying my bills.

Second, in the last year I started to consolidate my too many projects: some of them are now closed or going to be, some merged together, some other are suspended while I figure out where they should be directed to fully express their potential. Sometimes I experiment quietly new solutions (photography, facebook page and so on), not investing too much time in them, just exploring their potential.

This blog is one of them and I still plan to expand its topics but since I have to be very careful to be unobtrusive to people who just wat updates on themes and designs the whole thing has to be prepared with some attention. I’ll be probably working on this in July.

Now about themes: no big news for June, I think you can expect at least a new Sandvox Design in July and maybe that famous port of Grafite to RapidWeaver as well. No news on the WordPress side because I’m not up-to-date enough and version 3.0 is getting closer and closer.

Support is available as always, at the usual conditions, no change about that.

Feedback and suggestions are always welcome, thank you everybody for your support and kindness and see you really soon!

Almost one year has passed (wow, I have to think about something for the first anniversary!) and now it’s time to have a FaceBook page. Consider it as one more way to keep in touch, communicate, send feedback, promote your website (created with a Rabbit’s design, of course!), chat about the web or just meet other users.

It’s a sort of an experiment now, we’ll see day by day if this page is useful or not. I’ll try to limit my wall posts as much as possible so don’t be afraid to follow it: I’ll not monopolize your news feed…

If you have a FaceBook account and want to join, become a fan now!

The demo site is running again at a temporary address, it will stay there for a while, long enough to find a better solution.

Ok, now let’s go on withe better news: the new design is ready and available (read next post for it).

[Jul 22nd, 2010] – Update: new and definitive link is http://www.behindtherabbit.biz/demo/.

As you probably noticed, all my demo sites are hosted on a different domain (and previously they were at a different address): I was looking for the best solution, with no hurry (and definitely not worrying about SEO…). As a matter of fact, the subscription to my provider has expired and this is entirely my fault ’cause I didn’t pay attention to the expiry date. They say they sent me many e-mails, but they didn’t, or at least they didn’t send them to the right address – and I’m quite sure about this. Moreover they seem to be annoyed by my requests for a renewal (the domain is still mine for one more year!).

So I decided to say hello to TopHost, which is not as Top as it seems to be, and move all the domains parked there somewhere else.

So, for few days, there will be some confusion with demo sites (I have to place them somewhere right now!). Of course this happens just when I have to release a new design…

I’m leaving for a trip to London, where I hope to spend a good time and relax.

For this reason, no support is guaranteed till I come back to Rome later next week. In December everything will be as usual and hopefully I’ll be back working on some new theme.

See you in few days!

A lot of work these days to totally redesign my personal web pages. My previous website wasn’t organized, was mainly in italian and moreover it was a subfolder of another site, one of my (too) many projects.

I moved the new one to its own domain (it’s the first time I use the “.me” suffix).

About the code: I gave up with javascript frameworks (I initially thought about a mootools or JQuery effect for the top navigation menu) and with a custom @font-face: Cantarell, my first choice, looks great on Mac and I decided to implement this CSS3 function, but it’s ugly on Firefox for Windows (at least in Parallels). So I kept it simple: dynamic html with few php scripts.

For the graphics I must credit the “About me” pages of Khoi Vinh and Grace Smith as the source of my inspiration (well, even more than just an inspiration). As usual, Smashing Magazine has been a precious resource when I was struggling with indecision. Even if you’re not a designer, keep an eye on SM: you’ll find there a lot of useful information.

Best advertising for a web developer is a nice customer’s website. Moreover, real websites are inspiring for users too because even if the design is the same for all, building up a website from scratch is a truly creative process and everyone has his own taste and prefers his own way of doing things.

For my WordPress themes I chose really weird names; it was unintentional: I discovered just later that it was ridiculously easy to google them and see what users have done with my themes (there are thousands of them out there). If you do the same, you can see what I mean: some sites stick to the original designs, some are totally changed with really intrepid (!) colors, some are definitely better than the original.

Sandvox and Rapidweaver are less configurable, but you still can choose header, colors, images, you still have to give a balance to your content, your pictures, your pages. As a developer, when I see a nice balance between all these things I feel quite satisfied.

Starting from now I will link to best Rabbit’s sites around and the first is indeed PC Coach Ltd. by Bernd Kühn. I have to thank Bernd for his suggestions and feedback and because he is a kind of beta tester too: his website sports an unreleased (yet) version of Carbone for WordPress, perfectly integrated with his Sandvox website (I plan to release Carbone for WordPress later this year, but it will require some skills since WordPress is definitely not easy to use as Sandvox).

Anyway, if you’re looking for inspiration remember that many Sandvox websites are listed here. Did you send yours?

I’m slowly re-starting after a long (and – believe me – deserved!) vacation. I’m overwhelmed by how many things I have to do before I can go back to my usual routine, more than I expected.

Moreover, it turns out I’m probably allergic to my glasses and this is quite a problem (because I need them only when I’m coding).

Well, we’ll see…