OK, so here you have it! Just after midnight. There are certainly still bugs in this design, but we’re most of the way there. I’ve got a few other bobbles and extras I’ll be adding in the coming days and months, but this is the main look and feel for the thing. Watch the upper-right corner of the main white window for something fun in the coming days (or weeks if I’m really busy). I’m really hoping you’ll all give your honest feedback about it. Even the silent lurkers! It was extremely challenging to get it all to work even as well it does, but now that it’s up, it feels really rewarding.

Those of you who aren’t using Internet Explorer are probably being treated to the goodness known as PNG images. (Soon the IE users will also get to see the PNGs properly once I’m done making the necessary tweaks. Right now they unfortunately see ugly grey areas where the images are supposed to be transparent.) The “joshlewis.org” graphic at the top and the drop shadows and rounded corners on the main white window are all PNGs. Even the upper-left corner is rounded. You just can’t see it without removing the joshlewis.org graphic. But if you did, you’d see it under there.

My friend Eddie said something on this very blog a few months ago that I’ve had running around in the back of my web-developing brain since then. He said that websites (or at least a few that I made) look too boxy. I thought about that comment and I decided that I agreed enough to try to do something about it on my site. I don’t want it to be boxy, I want it to be beautiful. I want it to be layered and kinda pop out at you when you see it. Boxy flatness is a common problem, but most web designers satisfy themselves with either 1) looking boxy because it’s too hard not to, or 2) using lots of solid background colors that cover the entire page, thus giving the impression that it’s not their website that is boxy, but that it’s really just the browser window boxing them in. I didn’t want a solid color background, but I also didn’t want corners in my design. (You’ll notice that there is currently not a single right angle in this entire design.) So I sought out the wisdom of the web design geniuses at A List Apart, and I quenched my thirst with their article titled CSS Design: Creating Custom Corners & Borders Part II I didn’t end up following their recommendations to the letter. I had to improvise a bit because of a few differences in my code, but it turned out pretty well. It took me about four hours of intense negotiations with the CSS and XHTML to get it to work.

I’ll continue tweaking what you see based on your feedback over the next few weeks. You’ll notice that the individual entry pages and comments stuff haven’t really been tweaked much yet. I’ll get to it.

Update: w00t. It validates.
Update 2: I figured I’d post a JPG of what it’s supposed to look like so those using IE can see it now. (Then again, they could just download Firefox if they wanted a better browsing experience.)

I stayed up past 2am last night reading about how I’m going to do some stuff I wanted to have done before noon today, and due to a brief trip to Fry’s Electronics, it’s looking like the changes I’ll try to make today are going to be made after noon rather than before it. So please hang in there if you’re coming around here expecting to see some big change, or see the “orange” thing that everyone keeps buzzing about. I’ll probably be picking this blog apart piece by piece this afternoon, and it’s going to be a horrible mess. But I know you’ll be patient, and also use the comments on this entry to laugh at how strange it looks when it’s in mid-change.

Thanks. I know I can count on you guys.

First, have a peek from outside this public toilet and inside it too. Then try a little reading on the subject.

So, would you use it if you had the chance?

Steph and I were talking about my blog the other day, and she said that all the redesigns I’ve done of it (I think I’ve done four now, and she’s the only one who has seen all of them) were better than what I currently have, but for some reason I’ve stuck with what I currently have for well over a year now. The only reason I was able to give for that odd fact was that the other designs were never ready. She, being the artist, then taught me that nothing is ever ready, and it’s better to put whatever you’ve got out there for people to see than to sit around and tweak it in the hopes that it will somehow become a masterpiece. Because it probably won’t, and no one will ever benefit from it.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m giving myself a deadline of Saturday the 24th at noon to work on and post whatever redesign I can muster. But I have to post it no matter how ready it is. So it might suck. And it might break stuff. Or it might be mediocre. But it must be up, because that’s when it’s due.

So, watch this space. If I’m feeling especially risky, I’ll post several tweaks throughout the week. We’ll see what happens. Maybe it’ll become an interactive design session between me and all of you!