Hello, again. Took a bit of a blog break.
Of course, while gone, there’s been a blow-up controversy over a certain cycle track. Best line so far: “Bike lanes make me Hornby.”
More about all that later. But first, obviously a change. Price Tags readers were really clear – most didn’t like the three-column layout. So on to something new.
I chose “Vigilance” from the WordPress dashboard, after narrowing the selection to five:
– Enterprise
– DePo Square
– Oulipo
– Vigilance
– Twenty Ten
Like you care. But if graphics and fonts are your thing, let me know what you think.
looks great. i just got back to new york from a weeks vacation in vancouver – as always had a wonderful time in an amazing city. I spent quite a bit of time walking around the west end, and was really intrigued by the small pocket parks created by closing streets to traffic at key intersections… would love to know more about them.
Author
Steven –
The little miniparks West of Denman Street were part of the first traffic-calming strategy in North America, as fas as I know. In about 1971, the City engineers and planners proposed the maze of barriers to discourage through traffic from cutting through the neighbourhood north to south from Georgia to Beach Avenues. The idea was to keep through traffic on Denman.
The miniparks also added some green space into what was generally thought to be the densest residential district in Canada. (Actually wasn’t.)
It took until 1981 before the intervention, a proven success, was implemented East of Denman. Many still think it was an attempt to discourage street prostitution, which had grown in the residential parts of the West End in those years. (Actually wasn’t.)
East of Denman, the ratepayers had to contribute to paying for the parks and diverters. The local area improvement also needed a super-majority – and the vote was tight. But now you couldn’t remove a paving stone or roundabout without a lot of community resistance. (Though the diverters have been redesigned for bike traffic.)
Gord Price
Thanks Gordon. I found this:
http://designkultur.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/sfucity4-july2006.pdf
which links to this:
http://www.sfu.ca/city/PDFs/Disappearing_Traffic_Reappearing_Freeways_June28_2006.pdf
gems! the original link was found while perusing this site:
http://designkultur.wordpress.com/2010/07/25/architecture-west-coast-modernism-lagoon-terrace-vancouver-1960-2010-kenneth-h-gardner-architect/
which is a lengthy tangent but masterfully ties modernist condos, carpet samples and traffic calming all into one ever-loading web page.
Looks nice.
My eyes are much happier.
I very recently took the blogging plunge and I went with a “premium” theme called Flexx Professional from iThemes.com
One thing I did with mine was make the font size a bit bigger.
Hey looks great Gord. Also agree with Robert about the larger font size! I guess I was one of the few who liked the 3 column layout.
Hey Gord. Love this one its really easy on they eyes and the post are right in front which is much more easily read and view. I like it.
There are bits of formatting bugs – like when you reply to comments and they continuously offset to the right and the text become overlapped and jumbled. (see above)
Otherwise it’s nice and easy to read.
Thank god the site is back to normal! Three cheers!
Yep, I prefer this layout as well.
Cheers and welcome back.