As many of you may have noticed if you’ve been playing with the theme chooser in the sidebar, I’ve been working on a new layout for HandlebarSandwich.com. If you haven’t noticed, you probably have now, because I just activated the new theme as the main one.

Seeing as I don’t do this for any sort of job, it’s been a little here and a little there to get it working (and hence a drawn-out process), but I think it’s getting close enough to force the issue of finishing it by launching it.

I liked the greyscale of the old site, so I’m sticking with that, but the biggest change is that it now scales the width to your browser size. I personally have a 21-inch monitor on my computer, so it always kinda drove me nuts that the theme was fixed-width, and there were huge grey spaces on the sides on my nice big screen. What a waste! So now, it will scale with the screen, and you can utilize every inch of that 30-inch cinema display, and it will also allow my faithful readers who have a screen resolution of 1024×768 or less (about 35% of you) to still view the site without side-scrolling.

I do have to apologize to some of you, though. I did all the development and testing of the theme on Internet Exploder 7 and Firefox. I am aware that there are some issues with the sidebar in internet explorer 6, and according to my stats, that means about 17% of you are seeing a ‘crappy’ version of the site, with some weird graphics issues and some funkiness on the sidebar.

I’m working on it. Internet explorer 6 has some issues following web standards, and I’m not quite on top of it enough yet to get my fixes going. I am working on it, though.

In the meantime, I think you should all have a goal of downloading (and learning to love) firefox . If you have websites you absolutely need in internet explorer, just get the ie tab add-on. You won’t be sorry.

In the meantime, I am still tweaking the theme to get it where I want it, but I think it’s pretty close to being there. If you are one of the IE6 people, and refuse to upgrade to IE7 or firefox, you can still view the old layout by clicking “Equix V1.1” in the theme switcher on the right.

I’d love to hear any and all comments on the theme as well. I can’t say I’ll actually do anything about them, but I’d love to hear them nonetheless.

On a side note, I’m also working on a matching zencart theme to go with some future plans for cool stuff beyond stickers, but that’s still in the works.

Isn’t technology wonderful?