Website Refresh

A new website has just gone up at cantalibre.com. For those who know me, you’ll have noticed that my website gets a new look and a technology refresh every couple of years. It keeps the thing looking lived in and it helps me stay up-to-date with new developments in HTML, CSS, Javascript and a few of the many other tools, techniques and acronyms that surround them.

This update is version 8, so you can see how long I’ve been messing about with this. So long, in fact, that making a website “responsive” to different device screen sizes wasn’t even a thing when I wrote version 1.

You might not see many changes from version 7 🙂 I’ve changed the colours, the navigation bar and the site architecture (i.e. which pages link to which others) but it is basically the same as it has been for the past three iterations — a big index of all my novels and short story collections, together with a page describing each book. The main difference is under the hood.

For those with a technical bent, you may be interested to know that, instead of using “raw” Flexbox, I’ve gone for the much simpler bundling offered by the Bootstrap package. The great thing about Bootstrap is that, if you can live with the default sets of controls and the default Flexbox grid it provides, you don’t need to touch Javascript at all, or even CSS (although there is a tiny bit of each in there – what can I say, I’m obsessive).

Anyway, it should all be working now so, if you take a look and poke around a bit, don’t be shy about letting me know what went wrong, or didn’t work the way you liked. You can even use the form on the Contact page to send me your feedback — especially if it’s to say your device, screen size and browser combo was the one that made it collapse in a heap.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book I’m supposed to be writing (a new Luke Kelly novel).