Redesign
The past six months have taught me a bit about what I like in terms of design and layout.
I use my blog as a launch pad to get to the blogs of friends. About a week ago I realized that I was sick of the layout of my blog.
The greens and dotted borders were driving me mad. Too busy. Not enough negative space. Not simple enough.
So I logged into Blogger for the first time in a while to see if there were any new templates.
It was weird at first. Like visiting your highschool for the first time after being away at university. That passed.
What I found was I didn't like any of the new templates. I also found that I wanted to post again, but that I'd be damned if I did so with the blog looking the way it did.
So I decided to design a new one. It took about five minutes of staring at a blank page and two minutes of doodling. The rest hasn't been so easy.
Originally I was going to build it from scratch, but quickly abandoned that as lunacy.
What I did instead was probably equally nuts.
I took the Rounders 4 template that I was using and went through it line by line, changing things and figuring out how it worked by trial and error. I've spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth and cursing and shaking fists at the monitor.
The header image was shot today on the field north of my parents' house. Wind swept across hundreds of acres to get at and freeze my face and right hand before I was satisfied with the pics.
As I thawed, I took a break to write a column on the Gaza Strip for my opinion writing class. I worked some more on this, then had dinner and watched a movie with my sister and parents. Then went back to coding, drinking and cursing.
Playing with the header image went very smoothly. Five minutes with Photoshop and it looked as much like I wanted it to as it was going to get. That was a couple hours ago.
In the time since then, the rye has worn off and I've managed to get the colours on the page to look the way I want them to.
However, as I've only had IE to test the page with, I'm sure that this masterful bit of procrastination is far from finished. That can wait.
It's past 2 a.m. and I'm going to bed now.
Tomorrow I will get up, write a news story and drive to Guelph for a whirlwind visit. In the space of three hours I plan to have coffee with Shannon, shoot the shit with Ian, Jer and Robyn and go pick up Christa from her last class.
Hopefully she will let me use her computer to upload the header image to somewhere my blog can access it from, to save the new template and to post this entry.
For now, it's just a draft.
I use my blog as a launch pad to get to the blogs of friends. About a week ago I realized that I was sick of the layout of my blog.
The greens and dotted borders were driving me mad. Too busy. Not enough negative space. Not simple enough.
So I logged into Blogger for the first time in a while to see if there were any new templates.
It was weird at first. Like visiting your highschool for the first time after being away at university. That passed.
What I found was I didn't like any of the new templates. I also found that I wanted to post again, but that I'd be damned if I did so with the blog looking the way it did.
So I decided to design a new one. It took about five minutes of staring at a blank page and two minutes of doodling. The rest hasn't been so easy.
Originally I was going to build it from scratch, but quickly abandoned that as lunacy.
What I did instead was probably equally nuts.
I took the Rounders 4 template that I was using and went through it line by line, changing things and figuring out how it worked by trial and error. I've spent a lot of time gnashing my teeth and cursing and shaking fists at the monitor.
The header image was shot today on the field north of my parents' house. Wind swept across hundreds of acres to get at and freeze my face and right hand before I was satisfied with the pics.
As I thawed, I took a break to write a column on the Gaza Strip for my opinion writing class. I worked some more on this, then had dinner and watched a movie with my sister and parents. Then went back to coding, drinking and cursing.
Playing with the header image went very smoothly. Five minutes with Photoshop and it looked as much like I wanted it to as it was going to get. That was a couple hours ago.
In the time since then, the rye has worn off and I've managed to get the colours on the page to look the way I want them to.
However, as I've only had IE to test the page with, I'm sure that this masterful bit of procrastination is far from finished. That can wait.
It's past 2 a.m. and I'm going to bed now.
Tomorrow I will get up, write a news story and drive to Guelph for a whirlwind visit. In the space of three hours I plan to have coffee with Shannon, shoot the shit with Ian, Jer and Robyn and go pick up Christa from her last class.
Hopefully she will let me use her computer to upload the header image to somewhere my blog can access it from, to save the new template and to post this entry.
For now, it's just a draft.
