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…