Navelgazing 2: The Reckoning.
I don’t want to dwell on the redesign too much, but I do want to touch on a few points. So here we go.
Did You Know That I Have A Links Feed?
It’s true, and it’s here. I don’t want to say it’s the best link feed on the internet, but in 5 years of publishing, I’ve retained a whole 215-ish subscribers. Just sayin’. Its a pretty exclusive club. Get in on the ground floor.
Previous to 1 a.m. this morning, my linklist was being pulled in from del.icio.us. Adding a “pluggedin” tag to any bookmark I wanted to share and having it automatically blown out in a feed was certainly convenient, but there were always weird characters popping up once the items were pulled into Textpattern. Additionally, I’m just getting tired of the extra bulk that gets added to my del.icio.us account every time I want to share a funny LOLcats picture. Bringing links back into Textpattern gives me more control over both the formatting of the links themselves and my own “lol i have to link this!1” impulses.
Love Is Dead.
Well, “Loving…” is, at least. Some of you may remember that section of the site as my brief flirtation with sharing music via (pseudo) podcasting. I got some positive feedback for it, and it was fun to do, but ultimately the process became a hassle. And the free file hosting service I had been using became, um, un-free. All those entries are still in the Archives, but future “Loving…” articles most likely won’t have anything attached to make iTunes kick into download mode. Just links and the occasional embedded music player. Hope you’re not too disappointed.
Contrasting Views.
For the longest time I swore I would never do a “light on dark” design. There is a pretty fine line that these designs tread, balancing proper contrast with accessibility. When the meme was first gaining momentum, most of the designs literally hurt my eyes; they were far too high-contrast. But I relaxed my opinions over time, seeing well-executed and eyeball-friendly sites like Daring Fireball find that successful sweet spot. I spent a lot of time developing a pleasing contrast between text and background, so hopefully a similar sweet spot has been found here as well. Enjoy!
