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.