I launched the redesign of DrunkenFist.com last night. It’s my second HTML5 site. I took a lot of what I learned from the work we did on A Wider Net and applied it to a much larger project. Fun times.

A couple of notes.

Modernizr

I didn’t use Modernizr because I didn’t really use any advanced features in the site beyond the new elements. Well, I did use box-shadow on the menu dropdowns (do those qualify as “mega-dropdowns?”) but nothing else. Since the design won’t look broken in lesser browsers without the drop shadow, I decided to forgo Modernizr’s hints and just stick with the “fix it for IE” loop in the head.

Events

One advanced feature I did use, was the new Rich Snippets Events format. With Rich Snippets: Events Google leverages the hCalendar microformat to produce computer readable events that they can display in search results. Who knows if mine will get picked up, but my next art show is marked up all purty.

    <section id="upcoming">
		<h3>Upcoming Art Shows</h3>
		<p class="vevent"> 
			<a href="http://www.drunkenfist.com/304/2010/01/24/new-art-thing-paint-it-now-march-19-april-29-2010-the-distillery-gallery/"  
				class="url summary">&quot;Paint It Now&quot;</a> 
			<span class="dtstart"> March 19 
				<span class="value-title" title="2010-03-19" /> </span>
			-
			<span class="dtend"> April 29, 2010
				<span class="value-title" title="2010-04-29" /> </span> 
			<span class="location vcard"> 
				<span class="fn org">The Distillery Gallery</span>, 
				<span class="adr"> 
					<span class="street-address">516 East Second Street</span>, 
					<span class="locality">South Boston</span>, 
					<span class="region">MA</span> 
				</span> 
			</span> 
		</p>
	</section>  

Ant

I also spent a lot of time working with Ant. I’d never really worked with it before, authoring build scripts. I’d only consumed them. For this project I went to town, going from zero to sixty (it feels that way to me at least) in just a few weeks.

I’ll be writing up some performance related ant tasks in the coming weeks.

And there you have it. Please poke around the site and let me know if you see anything really crazy. There’s no IE6 support at current (and there may never be 🙂 ). Other than that it should be okay in all modern browsers. If it’s not please let me know so I can make it shiny.