Mingyu's Project Box

mingyu.co.uk in Chrome 21.0

mingyu.co.uk in IE 8.0

April ~ August 2012

A website for my recent projects with coded-from-scratch stylesheets and templates.

Keywords: HTML, CSS, Stacey CMS

I'm a die-hard minimalist, always striving to keep my (coded-from-scratch) stylesheets within 5 kB - in fact my other personal website has just 1.07 kB worth of styling! If I do go over, it's usually due to hefty CSS resets or workarounds and not a result of excessive embellishment on my part. So when I stumbled upon the super-lightweight Stacey CMS I simply had to build something with it.

Stacey is rather unusual in that it generates webpages without using databases. This makes it highly portable: duplicate your public_html directory and you have a complete, working copy of your site. Another thing I like about Stacey is that it doesn't have an admin interface - see, if the admin and developer are the same person, that means less switching accounts and more coding! Short of a custom CMS, Stacey is probably the most minimalistic a dynamic website can be.

I wanted my home page to be slightly messy but nonetheless accessible, so I went for alternating images and text boxes. The Masonry plugin looked neat, but I wanted my boxes to be the same size and people tend to scan horizontally anyway. Like most of my designs, the layout for this site is a fluid/elastic hybrid with resizeable text and wrapper but fixed width blocks. (Because I hate horizontal scroll bars.)

Some older browsers don't support text shadows and fixed position lists, but these elements degrade nicely in most cases unless you're a rare specimen who uses Dillo or something!