Fear the Crab

Way back in May I said that I was thinking of changing the format of this site, and thanks to recent scientific advances, today marks the first day of that redesign. The “scientific advances” I refer to are my days spent researching and understanding the very nature of CSS, WordPress, and good taste.

I figure, learning two out of three ain’t bad.

Hopefully the format is more readable. I borrowed many of the images and icons from the previous theme, but the layout and functionality was designed and built from the ground up. Added the Twitter feed to the sidebar that I said I was going to do, showing the last three tweets. As suggested by someone important, I included a complete list of archives by month and year, instead of the previous list of recent and random posts. The site is still a work in progress, and there are several things I’m probably going to tweak or remove altogether in the next several days.

I will also be going through the archives to tidy up some old posts and pictures, bring everything in line with the current theme. I never did go through the old LiveJournal stuff after it was imported, and I’m sure there are even areas within the actual content that reference URLs and images that no longer exist. How quickly and efficiently I clean those articles up is left to the imagination. I didn’t realize how many old entries I actually had until I saw what the archives function returned.

Someone told me that it’s a lot more effort to reinvent the wheel, but I discovered that I learned more by getting my sleeves dirty and starting from scratch. I did copy some elements of style, but added each one individually onto a blank slate so I could see how it interacted with everything else. I don’t mind trusting someone’s hard work, but I think I understood things better when I did it myself.