July 09 to earlier this week
July 09 to earlier this week. That's how long I've been thinking about upgrading the theme to this site, and doing nothing about it. Not one bit, not at all. This isn't to say that the theme I am using, a slight modification of the contributed 960 Robots theme, but it's not mine. And it's not really me. But I did think the header pulling in random stuff from Twitter was at least interesting. Over the weekend, I did start thinking again about what it was I wanted to do with this site. I was looking for something different in the theme than a lot of the contributed themes provide. This probably has something to do with the bit where a contributed theme, no matter how good or well designed (and a lot of them are great and really well designed these days) I'm just going to think about doing something different, somethign that works for just me, even if it means that I am, ultimately, going to be the only one that reads whatever it is I post here. So I might as well be happy with it, and experiment with the design until it makes me happy.
<div style='float:right;'><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/VyrfKHMwBIFj1J0h97QO9w?authkey=Gv1sRgCPiU7Ne0npj3Xg&feat=embedwebsite"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_VmynKxetfww/S0M36lG6h9I/AAAAAAAADBw/CODjT9enawQ/s144/Redesign-001-sketch.jpg" /></a></div>
Rather than just trying to throw together a lot of different elements together, I tried to think about what I wanted with this redesign. Partially, I wanted something simpiler than I have done in the past. Maybe a little cleaner design, and not so much obvious eye candy for the sake of eye candy. There are also some changes I'm thinking about making to how I deal with the site. Some things are going to be and not all that meaningful. Posting short teasers or summaries to the front page instead of full posts, because they do tend to be somewhat long once I get going or start ranting or just babbling via the keyboard. Other things might not even be visible to anyone. I don't tend to use most of the features that Drupal makes availabe as far as having multiple content types availabe. Why does everything I write have to be a blog post? I don't think it has to be that way. Turns out it doesn't. Some things are not not going to be done via the blog anymore, and some content may start showing up in the alternative content types or organizational methods beyond this just being a blog.
Some things that right now show up on every page are only going to show up on some of the pages. The daily photo and the "What Am I Doing?" feed are the principal things I am thinking about there. Unless I embed an image into the psot (and I am considering modifying blog posts to include the photo from that day) I'm not 100% decided if I want all this extra stuff to show up.
Overall, there are changes. I'm not nearly done yet, but it's coming, if anyone is watching.
I'm also considering not posting everythign everywhere, as in the 20-or-so social networks and web 2.0 sites. I think it might jsut be time to go back through and look back at what sites I'm using and how I'm using them. So many of them are fire-and-forget I can't even think of how pushing content, either the lifestream or the blog, is creating value for anyone. I'm not going to most of the sites. I'm not getting inbound links from any of the sites. Some I don't even find interesting anymore (if I ever did). So why am I pushing content or links ot places where I don't know anyone else nor even really have any "friends," or "followers" or "fans"?
The funny bit is that the restart of the theme redesign started as a break from trying to update the social network / web 2.0 map I created a while ago.
