All New and Improved
Website redesigns sound like such good ideas, but they really are a crapload of work for anything more than a single page of text with a couple of animated gifs of guys digging holes. It's over now and I feel like it was all worth it, but I also wonder what life would be like if I'd devoted all that time to something else, like playing the guitar, learning to knit or training in kung fu. Cooking fabulous pancakes or mastering foot massages also sound rather worthwhile.
I'll do a long and involved article at some stage going through the redesign process and the decisions I made, but I'm really far too tired right now. The big change is that the Web News section is entirely gone. I've decided it's better to integrate it into the main section, like this:
- Cool article on The Expert Mind from the Scientific American. There's lots of focus on the game of Chess, and some interesting stuff about how masters and grandmasters play.
- Excellent video of Neil Gaiman talking at Microsoft Research. It doesn't seem to work in Firefox, but IE seems to work just fine.
- A tech guy does amusing things to some local wireless hogs, such as turn all their images backwards and even make their images blurry.
- Chris Cornell is doing the theme to the new Casino Royale film. Apparently Cornell is "both soulful and tough".
- Canadian company Solestrom is making a bikini with built in UV meter that bleeps when its wearer has had enough sun for the day. It's a pretty cool invention, but why did the Canadians discover it? It's not like they're known for their sunshine.
And so on. The big advantage to this style of layout is that I can gasbag on for as long as I want when I'm linking something, instead of trying to cram it all into two lines in a sidebar. I've also canned the "counter" script because it really didn't do much, and it was occasionally confusing search engines into thinking the linked article was actually on this site, instead of off somewhere else.
Anyway, enough rambling. Let me know what you think, and if there's anything broken.