Website realignment
If you're reading this via RSS, go ahead and pop on over to my site to feast your eyes on my redesign re-align. If you're already on the site, but nothing looks different, you may need to do a hard-refresh (Ctrl + F5). That should unveil some smallish changes.
Since I already did a redesign earlier this year, not knowing if I'd have much time to do so once I took the new job, I didn't really want to do a full CSS Reboot. So, imagine my delight when I read a recent article by design expert Cameron Moll entitled Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign.
This was exactly the justification I needed to continue in my laziness. All seriousness aside though, I'm pretty contented with the layout and functionality of my site as it is now, but was just getting a little tired of looking at the visuals. Since it's been suggested that the appearance of your blog affects your writing, I figured I should do something before quality takes a turn for the worst (too late?).
So here you have it, my slight re-alignment, including change of oil and tire rotation. This consists most obviously of the new body background and header photo (by my wife). I've also got rid of Gravatars in the comments, as they weren't really loading consistently enough. I figure, if the greats such as Stopdesign and SimpleBits don't utilize them, then I could get by without 'em.
There's also more RSS integration now. Plus, I redid my portfolio a bit. I don't really have any new work to show off, as much of what I've been doing at my new job has been for our internal sites. However, I have made it a little more user-friendly to view. I've also ditched MySQL handling of the CSS, reverting back to FTP'ing old-school static files. The reason for this is performance, so that everytime my site loads, it's not fetching the styles from the database. However, I still use Textpattern to run everything else.
I guess I just prefer to hand-edit CSS files with some more versatility than is allowed in a web-form. I've been loving the new beta version of Araneae, as it has far better code-highlighting than even Dreamweaver 8 can boast. The one reason that people use DW for CSS, code-hinting, is lost on me because I see it more as an annoyance than anything. It's like trying to play a song by memory and someone constantly thrusting sheet-music in front of you.
Anyway, that sums things up. I mainly just wanted to clear my plate of the re-align, so I can focus on a few other things that are as of yet under wraps. For the most part, the changes to this site were to make my life a little easier. Take my sincere apologies that the appearance isn't drastically different.