…but I’m shaking things up a bit.

Short Version:

The site design is in transition. The layout you see is more or less what the new layout is going to be, but it’ll take me some time to put in all the really useful navigation bits and also to adjust the color scheme, though I did kludge around with the background color to make it resemble the old layout to save me from responding to everyone who took the almost-black-on-glaring-white as a design choice rather than an unadjusted default. Yes, the floating islands of whiteness that remain are ugly. They aren’t staying, but the rest of today is for writing, not CSS and HTML tweaking. I don’t really think anyone’s going to complain about that.

Update: Saturday

No sense making a separate post for this…

As those who follow my Livejournal and Facebook sort of know (and there’ll be more info about that in the coming week), I took some big steps to get my non-professional life in order this past week, with the intended goal of getting my professional life (that is, writing) back on track. That’s gone well… better than I expected… but we’re not seeing the fruit of it just yet.

While being too frazzled to write, I got a lot of stuff that’s not writing done, and some half done, like updating the site’s look. Yesterday I got 2,000 great words that don’t quite fit together right. I think they’ll turn into an actual chapter on Monday. The part of my brain that’s working right now is the part that halfway understands techy stuff. So, I think the most productive thing to do is finish what I started on the site. Anybody who’s really interested in watching me fumble around with HTML in public view can watch the process and leave comments as things develop, but anybody who’s just looking for story should come back Monday. It’ll be a good chapter… it’s almost there now.

A Note On Width:

This is from my reply to a comment below. I’m reproducing it here because I suspect it will answer a lot of peoples’ questions/concerns:

I’m trying to hit a balance on the width… I don’t want it to use up all available space on a widescreen monitor, because having just looked at the site on a widescreen monitor for the first time recently I find that leads to a lot of annoying tracking side-to-side while reading. But I don’t want to waste space on a netbook. This layout is set to use a fixed width for both columns. My goal is to make it stretch out to a certain maximum width but no further, so if somebody has a giant widescreen monitor they will still have some gutters on the sides but the content will fill a reasonable-sized column, and it will still fit comfortably in a netbook. I have an idea how to do that, but since I fiddle with CSS about once a year I’m having to relearn a lot. For now, I’ve adjusted the fixed widths a bit to reclaim more space for content from the sidebar.

Update: Sunday

Okay, the width seems to be working and now navigation is coming in. There are still some elements (the navigation links included) where the backgrounds don’t match up, because they were made for the default color scheme. Unless major problems crop up I’m done messing with code until next weekend, but I’ll leave this post up and visible for feedback and error reporting. You folks have been great about letting me know when one of the changes broke it for you. Thanks a lot for the help!

Update: Monday

I’m seriously open to suggestions for what color to make links in the body of the story to have them show up against the background and be obviously links even if they’re in the middle of the text. Should I just give in and make it underline them so that color contrast is less important?

Also, I’ve taken the step of temporarily hiding some of the more distracting/cluttered elements using CSS. Depending on your system you might see things blipping in and out of existence when the page first loads. That’s a temporary state of affairs until I decide what to do with them, long term.