“Outsource the design”:http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/regulus/, focus on the writing.
Archives
Lifestream
-
Ken Tekserve will now attempt to revive my dead iMac. http://img.ly/1M00 [kenwalker].— 2d ago via Twitter
-
Ken Why doesn't Thunderbird hide that goofy "Sending Message" dialog by default? How to get rid of it (from 2006): http://bit.ly/c0tns9 [kenwalker].— July 26th via Twitter
-
Ken @alissamarie #thegoodlife is rocking my son on a suburban porch in the wee hours of a cool summer night, sipping a Mike's Pink Lemonade [kenwalker].— July 23rd via Twitter
Pretty good choice.
But, at least IMO, you just took away the most interesting aspect of blogging. One of the greatest things about visiting sites is to see what people have done/are doing with their pages.
If everyone chooses a ‘cookie cutter’ template then there is little reason to visit the actualy sites.
Why not just produce an rss feed as your main page? Perhaps put a little style to it via xslt so that people don’t come across raw XML by accident. Have another page that accepts comments for each post via xml/rpc.
Of course, i still haven’t finished moving my new design throughout my site :-/
Hey Mike, I agree. Using a prefab design does take away an element of personality–our personality is as evident through the site aesthetic as it is in the words. However, the time I spent hacking together designs back in the MT days was enormous: you only need to flip through the “kennsarah.net archives”:http://kennsarah.net/category/kennsarahnet/ to get an impression of how long this stuff really takes.
This is an intentional decision to quit blogging about blogging (or, at least, designing the blog) and write something more interesting. I’m hoping that less time spent thinking about CSS hacks equates to more productive time saying something worthwhile.
That said, I already have and will continue to tweak this design. This template lets you customize colors and imagery, and I think newer versions of advance templates like Regulus and K2 are only going to make it easier for customization. Of course, if you want to view the site without the design you could always switch off CSS in Firefox:
View→Page Style→No StyleOutsourced or no, I like the new layout. And I understand the part about time spent working on content vs time spent working on layout. Layout takes MUCH longer.
Merry Christmas
I dig it. Crisp, clean, and easy to navigate. I visit blogs for the content, not the design. I’m of the camp that I wish more blogs were cookie-cutter in design so I never had to figure out how to navigate the site. I appreciate being to zap to a site, know where to look for the information I want, and get out quickly.
I probably try to suck up too much data in my brain as it is, but that’s the type of web user I am. If I could train myself to have each eye read a different web site on two different monitors at one time, I probably would.
I’m excited to hear more of the fumbling ideas kicking around in your head, to see you spend fifteen minutes on a piece and release it to the world, no apologies, and I think this is a great move. Kudos.
Ahh, it’s lovely. I like it.
Thanks, everyone.
Slightly related: we’re now running WordPress 2.0. If everything looks good after a day of use, I’ll be migrating the “Village Church”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com over this evening, as well.