A New Look for My Blog
Welcome back to The Frank Spot. I know you were probably expecting another deep, exhaustive post, but I wanted to interject a smaller essay on why my site design has already changed. This change will only be obvious to those of you who read Post 0.5 while I was building the site; the rest of you won't notice any change at all...I started with a nifty little template called iTheme Techno. It was nice to look at, had some cool widget features, and really spoke to me on a creative level. It was also one of the most frustrating things I've ever played with on the web. Please know that I'm not criticizing any of the people involved with designing the template, or porting it to blogger — they all did wonderful jobs. But it's not easy to ensure functionality with every piece of third-party code that might be added. Sometimes, elements just don't work well together. That's what happened here. I mentioned a few template and widget problems at the end of Post 0.5; I stumbled into many, many more when I tried to integrate Intense Debate as my commenting system. So it was time to find another template.
I looked at about a hundred different designs; each had its own flair, its own positives and negatives, its own way to represent me. Ultimately, I picked the one you see now: Chocolate Candy. I liked the darker colors, subtle hues, and the general layout of the page. I would have preferred a right sidebar instead of a left one, but it was good start. (I may change the layout at some future point, but right now I'd rather focus on content.) Even so, it took me almost a week to get this new template up and running — and not without a lot of extra coding. If you visit in IE6, you might notice a few little CSS problems, but nothing to make me beat my fists on the desk and go without sleep. And the commenting system (including the recent comments widget) works pretty well.
I'll be tabling design tweaks for the foreseeable future, but I'd appreciate any feedback you'd care to provide about the layout, colors, flow, etc. I'd like to avoid tearing this one apart completely, or building a template from scratch, but I'll seriously consider anything you good folks suggest.
Coming Soon
It's taken me longer than I expected to get my next "real" post together: I'm working on it now, and you should see it sometime in the next two weeks. I promise it will be deep and entertaining, and just as long as you'd expect (read: worth waiting for). Later this week, I'll be posting a chocolate chip cookie recipe that I've been working on for quite a while. I don't know if baking cookies will keep you happy until I churn out my next philosophical rant, but I'm going to put the recipe up anyway. If you try it, I think you'll like it. If not, your friends just might. Either way, I hope you'll post your comments.Thanks for reading, and I'll see you soon.
