what's the point?

Ch-ch-changes

As any fool can see, I've redesigned yet again. I can't really say why I did it, but I can say what I was aiming to accomplish. When I first started blogging I was doing it as a sort of online extension to my own memory. You see, I've got what we in the memory business refer to as a pretty bad memory, so writing these things down not only helps reinforce the memories, it also gives me some place to go back and look when I invariably forget having seen a movie or met a person or been to a state. However, as time has moved on I've stopped posting about my day to day activities for various and sundry reasons (primary among them is that they just aren't all that interesting) and Robin has started blogging (and while her blog certainly doesn't focus on our day to day life, she does mention events of interest so that should be enough). As I've moved more away from a journaler and more towards...well, I don't really know how to categorize my blogging these days, other than as sporadic...and poorly written too...this sentence doesn't actually end (mmm, meta blogging)!

Given the sporadic nature of the updates here, the first thing I decided had to go was the calendar. All it did was show everyone how infrequently I updated. And waste space. We hate things that waste space and so the calendar was right out. In keeping with the "it's updated whenever it's updated and that's that" theme, it occurred to me that most people who read this, will probably have read all but the most recent post, so there was really no reason to show more than the current entry on the main page. And so it was, and I saw it and it was good. However, I wanted to make sure that people coming in from searches (hello to everyone looking for an identification of the spider you just killed!) had easy access to other recent posts, so from there came the "Also Recently" list at the end of the current post. Other than that, there aren't many major changes, clearly a new color scheme, tightened up some of the items on the right, a few css tricks on the main content to improve readability and voila, here we are. Hope you like it.

That's a lie, I don't care if you like it. I'm looking at you here Will.

One side benefit of the new layout is it makes me write more to make the page look balanced. Admittedly that's a bad reason to write more, but I look at it this way, it makes the chances of more substantial posts much greater. And while I'll probably still weigh in from time to time with quick entries, I hope the norm moving forward will be longer, and hopefully more interesting posts.

There are still a few outstanding issues I need to address with the redesign, I just noticed the Category and Monthly archive pages still have date headers, I'll probably leave them there, but they need to match the new look and feel. Also, I'll hopefully get some icons from Craig to make things a bit more interesting. The whole colored boxes look is getting old to me.