Summer (Blog) Fashions

How can you tell when I have a little more time on my hands? A change to the look and feel of this blog is a sure sign. For those who don’t read it via the feed (which means, family and a few others, rather than other bloggers), I’ve once again fiddled with the theme or rather the pages of the blog/web site. There are a few minor glitches, but overall, I’m pleased with this one, and if I don’t screw it up, this design might be in place for a while. The picture of the mountains in the header is from a recent picnic at Locarno Beach.

(Warning, geekery to follow : ) I’m still a fan of the Georgia font for body text, but now I’m making the more standard font choice of a sans serif (Helvetica or Arial if you don’t have that installed) font for headers and navigation. I’ve decided to take the chance of using the Wordpress ‘widget’ technology for the sidebar, instead of relying on the theme’s own PHP code for generating the calendar, search box, blogroll and category list, which may or may not be a good idea. Already I can see some disadvantages to this approach, as the sort order of the blogroll is no longer randomized and always appears in alphabetical order. I guess the answer is to use a different widget, but I’m new to this approach. I also can’t figure out how I’ll insert Flickr thumbnails between widgets. I’m thinking that will need a widget of its own. Will have to research further.

At any rate, the advantage to experimenting is that you learn more, so I’ll surely be playing around a bit more. I’m already a bit more sure of myself on the CSS side of things, so hopefully there will be fewer layout glitches.

Now I just have to figure out how to get the home page listed in the page list…