so…i never liked the list blog part of my site. it was just unimaginative and boring. i’ve been wanting to change it, but i never knew how. i wanted the design to actually exhibit a list. i bet most people didn’t even realize the categories were list items. so i conceived this design this week. i think it looks pretty good. makes it look like an actually list. hopefully it’s clearer that it’s a list. the best part was it required minimal changes. it took me maybe a few hours max to change everything. and i made the notebook paper all by myself! (with an example to work off of). goes to show that if you know exactly what you want, it’s so much easier to make something. let me know what you think! haha as if anyone reads this.

the past couple of weeks i’ve been making little fixes and changes.  some firefox fixes.  ff4 just came out.  not sure how that looks.  not overly anxious to look at that.  finally added the “pics” and “list” links.  links to the latest pic and the whole list respectively.  next i want to make the picture browsing a better experience.  can i just dynamically load each picture?  i just dont like how the thumbnails reload on every picture.  got to think of something.

so i imported the comments.  fairly easy.  mysql is pretty easy to work with.  i should have done the same with the pictures.  anyways…434 comments.  not bad.  a rate of 1.3 per post.  probably can’t keep up that rate unless i proactively comment in the photoblog community.  do not want.  or maybe i should to encourage me to take more pictures.  which is the next item of my list.  ”take more damn pictures”.  but that’s for later.

i also changed some of the site design.  i took out the scrollability of the front pictures.  it was just a coolness factor.  didn’t add anything functionally.  i dont want people browsing through the images on the front page.  i want them to do it in the pics section.  i also darkened the arrows when scrolling through the thumbnails.  and i added a line under the clickable thumbnails.  hopefully it makes things clearer.  next up…a main list page and a main pics page.

so i took a first cut at “cross-browser compatibility”.  aka hack away.  ie is definitely in the worst shape.  i’ve checked ie7 and it’s brutal.  (there’s no way i’m going to check any lower…it doesn’t deserve it).  as quick fixes, i changed the functionally of the site on ie7.  like no front page scrolling (which i may change for the rest as well).  but right now it’s at the point where someone using it can somewhat navigate the site.  firefox and ie8 have this annoying misalignment of the post titles.  i have no idea how to fix it.  chrome and safari looks fine.  everyone should use chrome.

so now i have a big to do list to pretty up the site.  more on the side of improvements rather than fixes.  oh, and i want to try to migrate the comments from the old site to here.  i bet that will be fun.  haha it’s not like anyone comments anymore anyways.  but i like the continuity.

well well.  apparently i get bored of my site every 3ish years.  so i redesign it.  i start out getting super excited about coming up with the design and what it should look like.  then once i actually start working on it i hate it.  why don’t i ever learn?  this one took up a good portion of my past two weekends.  once you get the basic design down, it’s 90% tedious stuff.  an hour here trying to figure out why something isn’t working…an hour there redoing some css formatting.  and every time i redo my website i change the backend.  first was movable type, then pixel post, and now wordpress.  and i always have to build my own template from scratch.  it’s “funner”.  and then it doesn’t turn out anywhere close to what i was originally thinking.  anyways, enough complaining.

so this is my new site.  the idea behind it is to be able to do a little blogging along side of my existing photoblog.  so there are two sections…pics and list.  i’ve decided that my blogging would essentially be around a list of stuff i want to do.  i always have a bunch of projects i want to do, and writing about it might help me get them done.  one of them being “make a kick ass blog”.  yea…so we’ll see how much “blogging” i’ll actually be doing.

anyways, the site still need a lot of work.  lots of broken stuff here and there, but it’s still somewhat functional.  so it’s a work in progress…