time for a change

(Again.)

Prompted by several things (not least of which was the opportunity of being able to observe someone else using it on someone else’s equipment – there’s nothing like seeing your shortcomings projected onto a large screen!) this site is due for another overhaul.

Significant chunks of the last few weekends have been spent re-coding the page templates from the ground up and then, whaddyaknow, WordPress announces another release due for tomorrow! Hey ho.

I’ve mostly finished the new site, however that means I’m now up against The 10% Wall. You know the one: where the last 10% of the work manages to take up 90% of the total time. Sigh. Perhaps time to back off a bit and then come back to it with fresh eyes later…

What I thought I’d do in the meantime was to put some thoughts down here just as a way of keeping the juices going.

Here’s a quick teaser-screenshot of the forthcoming Genzaichi Edition:

screenshot

As you can see I’ve gone back to the light background and white-space of previous incarnations. Also a return to the sort of flat graphic style that I seem to gravitate naturally towards. In fact, there’s really not a lot of obvious decoration in this one at all. Probably why I’m having to spend so much time tweeking the little details…

The other big change is more functional: I’ve decided to give commenting another go.

After bad experiences with spam on the weatherproject site, over the past few years I have avoided giving other people the ability to leave comments on posts. The tide is changing though. I’m assuming WordPress now has better inbuilt protection against spam, but I also see the people around me becoming more au fait with blogs and the idea of commenting on other people’s sites.

Add to this the recent announcement of the upcoming closure of Midwest (strange how the fora have just sort of died off), and really positive experiences of utilising blog commenting to help drive collaborative projects, I’ve decided to give it another go. If it all goes to pot I can always disable the function, but I hope it won’t come to that.

Of course, the other thing to consider is that there might just be a horrible silence

What else can I say? JavaScript libraries, sIFR and IE are nearly playing together nicely. All I’ve really got to do is wait for some blind monks to get back to me…

[I’ve run out of steam now. Can you tell? Perhaps I should just go back and have another look at the line heights…]