Edit: Extremely temporary. Already taken down and work is beginning on a new version. I’ll keep this version for now as it seems to work.

Well, I kind of finished the new design. I sort of gave up and rushed it out the door there at the end, just to see if my mind changes once I see it live. It hasn’t. I’m still not really a fan, but I’ll leave it up for a week or so just to make sure.

As of right now it works, but barely. My Ma.Gnolia links aren’t working properly, the year doesn’t show up properly in the date box, the comments aren’t styled, the header doesn’t have any links, the footer is nowhere near where I wanted it to be, and there’s no real archive. Other than that though, it’s functional.

I’d have to say that my biggest dissapointment is that it turned out incredibly similar to my Photoshop mockup. So, it’s not so much the site that I don’t like, it’s the overall design. Which is odd because I did like it in Photoshop. There’s a very good possibility that I’m just not a very good designer. In fact, I’d have to say that’s definitely my issue. I tried to design a site that had all sorts of design elements that I simply don’t understand, or can’t properly convey.

There is a bright side to this redesign failure though, and that’s that I learned a few more things about working with Wordpress. I had to modify some of the functions that Wordpress uses to get some of the desired results. They were incredibly minor, but it just goes to show how useful a working knowledge of PHP is when working with this beast.

Oh well. I guess it’s back to the drawing board. I think I’ll stick with something incredibly minimalist next time. Maybe that won’t require as much “talent.”

A few months back I had developed a renewed enthusiasm for my blog. I posted a couple of meaningless thoughts, and began the process of creating a new Wordpress template to spice up the joint. Fast forward about 5 months, and not much has been done. I’ve completed around 80% of the index page template, and about 20% of all the other pages. And since I didn’t really want to create any new blog posts until the new template was up, I haven’t written any. The site has basically died.

Lucky for me, I have exactly 0 regular readers. However, the occasional readers that may have popped by have seen nothing worth sticking around for. And that’s completely uncool. What’s the point of having a blog if you don’t blog? It’s like having a pool table and never using it (another thing on my list to start using more).

I plan to work on the site this long weekend, and have the new design up by Monday night. If I can stay away from my XBOX 360 long enough, and find some time between celebrating my beautiful wife’s birthday, I think I can do it.

Ok, so these past few blog posts have really opened up my eyes to how bad my design for this site is. Something about the look, just screams “ewww.” Not exactly sure what it is, but it’s certainly visible. I’ve never been very good at design, but this is simply… boring. Not what I intended.

When I started this current version, I was really enamored with Dan Cederholm and Jason Santa Maria’s web pages. And you can certainly see inspiration from both of those sites in my version. The Georgia font and sidebar titles are almost direct replicas of Jason’s prior version. The header is a sad knock off of Dan’s Simplebits. The problem though, is that both of those guys are talented. They’re spectacular designers. So when I try to emulate them without blatantly stealing (which I kind of did), it looks horrible. Also, it’s darker than I wanted.

Since Ficlets is down, I decided to go ahead and start looking at the design of my blog again. I hit up Khoi Vin’s blog because I know he has a cool link section to a ton of great designer’s pages and started looking around for inspiration. I visit many of the sites he links to every once in a while, just to see what sort of cool stuff talented folks are up to, so I’ve seen much of the design that’s out there. But a few guys have gone through changes recently, like Jason Santa Maria (whose new design is very sweet) and Shaun Inman. And while those sites are cool, I’m looking for something with a little more… color, I guess.

I happened upon Dan Rubin’s SuperfluousBanter, which I had seen before, but really inspired me to go for something different. You can see how colorful it is, without being gaudy. I think that’s an incredible feat. I really like his use of color in the sidebar links, and the way he sticks to a single base color and gets so much out of it. It’s really quite nice looking.

Now, I’m not going to rip his site exactly, but I think he’s helped push me in a new direction, away from the monotone white, grey, and black of this site. Sure there’s a little red and blue thrown in, but it’s not quite enough. So, as of tonight, I’m going to start on a new WordPress template for the site, and I’m hoping that I can accomplish what I want using WordPress without having to resort to coding the whole thing in django or Ruby on Rails considering I don’t know either of those languages. I’m fairly proficient in PHP, so sticking with WP is really in my best interest at this point.

For the next week or so, you may the template for this page switch over to Kubrick or an in-progress version of MutedSound 2.0. And yes, I do realize that I’m talking to myself as there’s not many people who actually come here (none on a daily basis). Though, a couple friends from Ficlets do seem to stop by on occasion (Kwatz even added me to his blogroll, how awesome is that?).

Apparently the comments aren’t working properly.

I hastily threw this thing together thinking that if it were up, I might actually post something worthwhile. As anyone can plainly see, that did not happen. Yet, in my haste, I didn’t actually test the comments. So now, even if someone does comment (why would they?), it won’t show up.

Looks like I’ve got some work to do tonight. Maybe I’ll even work on putting up that one post about why I hate John McCain so much.

I promise to talk about something new soon, but who cares since nobody is reading this anyway.

As of last night, my ficlet Pink Cigarette is the second most popular ficlet on ficlets.com with over 460 views. Yesterday afternoon it only had around 70 views, so something drastic happened but I haven’t the faintest clue as to what. I wish I knew because knowing that hundreds of people are reading my story is exciting. Especially considering all of the comments and ratings have been positive. I would love for the same thing to happen with a few of my other stories that I’m particularly proud of.

If anyone makes it here from my profile link there, please accept my most humble thanks for taking time out of your day to read one of my stories. I’m sorry that there isn’t more here at the moment, but there definitely will be within a few more months. Feel free to come back at some point. If you liked any of my ficlets, there’s a definite chance that you’ll enjoy something else that I create and post somewhere on this series of tubes.