Redesigning Again

Yes, every time I redesign this site I get tired of it after 6 months. What begins as a bril­liant idea becomes an insuf­fer­able eye­sore. Despite obsess­ing over this one for a cou­ple weeks, I’m cer­tain I’ll hate it before too long.

I was work­ing for months on a graph­i­cal over­haul of the last design, when I real­ized that the whole thing was actu­ally pretty uncom­fort­able to read. And that my graphic art skills are lam­en­ta­ble. It was also pre­vent­ing me from ever post­ing, because the newest post was always dis­played promi­nently on the front page, although every­body who reads this thing gets here from Google.

Do blogs even need front pages any­more? What for? Any­body who would revisit a site to check for new con­tent just sub­scribes to the feed instead. And if you nav­i­gate to the front page after read­ing a spe­cific post from a Google search, what good does it do you to be pre­sented with the 8 lat­est posts, all in a giant col­umn sev­eral thou­sand pix­els tall or more? I’ve increas­ingly avoided writ­ing front pages like that, in favor of some­thing that can fit in a sin­gle win­dow, more or less, with con­tent that isn’t just lim­ited to most recent posts.

The focus of this design was read­abil­ity and, to some extent, flex­i­bil­ity. It should allow me to post a lot more than I usu­ally do, and about more things. I’ve always tried to avoid let­ting this become a links blog, which may change slightly. I shouldn’t be afraid of writ­ing a post that’s less than 200 words, for instance. And a Deli­cious feed couldn’t hurt. And because peo­ple are here for such dif­fer­ent rea­sons — some need advice on FFm­peg, some are close friends — I want to make tag and cat­e­gory sub­scrip­tions eas­ier and the front page more dynamic and inter­ac­tive, with a shout­box and maybe with Matt Mullenweg’s com­mu­nity tag­ging, pro­vided that I start post­ing more pho­tos, which of course requires tak­ing more in the first place.

As long as I’m talk­ing, I just bought an Acer Aspire One, the white kind with an 8GB solid-state hard drive and Linux. It weighs two god damn pounds, and will be a real breath of fresh air after hav­ing lugged around my 7-pound Com­paq for five years. I just pulled the trig­ger on it, I hope I like it once it arrives Tues­day. Every­thing I’ve read about it has been pos­i­tive, so I’m sure I will. I plan to replace its lit­tle baby Linux with Ubuntu, so we’ll see how smoothly that goes, although I don’t really plan on using it for any­thing other than Firefox.