Obviously it is back now. Phew.

The good news is that I have found a new content management tool called Word Press, and there are hundreds of templates that I can use to make the look that I want. I have to accept that I am not a webdesigner and will have to accept (with good grace) the skills of others.

This has also been slowing me down on other stuff as well. I should have been writing a whole bunch of copy for our new business website. But I’ll talk about that in a different post. As usual I hope to start writing more again, since I feel like there is a bunch of stuff backing up in my brain just busting to get out.

I listened to an interesting podcast this morning from Dave Winer this morning. He was talking about the reluctance to release pre-formed ideas out to others since the net effect was usually that they ended up causing him grief. This came from an imbalance of people saying negative things about the work or ideas that had been distributed. On reflection however, he went of to say that this was a necessary part of the process of both getting things to work and to start getting a concensus from others. ‘Go Quickly’ – he said.

Well that is how I want to re-invigorate what I am doing. ‘Go Quickly’.

One of the things that has bugged me for years has been looking at the source code of other designers with really nice looking sites, only to find an absolute mess of tags all through it. I remember trying to layout a webpage so that the content sat in the middle inside a box shape of some sort, and being thrilled about discovering that I could use a ‘table’ to control where stuff landed.

There was another part of me though that thought that was cheating a bit. I mean a table was for putting data in right? Of course I then discovered that even though my table created a page that looked ok in one browser when I looked at it in a different one I was appalled. It looked nothing like I had built it.

Well times have changed, and it is time that I caught up. The thing that was bugging me was that I wanted my words to stay in their own context (ie not in a table) while being able to apply formatting with fixed styles. I could do this in MS Word but nothing seemed to do what I wanted. This separation of content from display formatting is now built into the latest web standards. I have been reading a book about them by Jeffrey Zeldman. It is interesting what a small core community there is in standards land. Many of the google / blogger / a-list-apart folk all are linked to the promotion and development of these (not so new now) standards.

DECREE: I Will strive to make every webpage that I code compliant with web standards.

Surprisingly this is easier for me now even though the coding is much stricter because the standards enforce the separation that I was looking for. Content is content, Design is design. The two should be able to work together without having to be dependent on each other. This is what web standards brings to the game.

I have labelled this series of discussion with a new running version number. This is the first major change to the Rounders template that was supplied by Blogger after their big redesign. I have been making gradual changes but to really break loose I need to get rid of the rounded corners that give the template its name. This is really the only visible change.

Behind the scenes I have moved the style sheet out of the main document and into it’s own file. This will probably screw up all of the archive pages but I’ll get back to them later.

I the mean time I will be trying a few new things out. If things look crap and you are looking over here when it happens, let me know via the comments, and if you have any suggestions this noobie wants to hear them.

Unfortunately that will have to wait till some other time. 3 hours of stuffing around with style sheets on a ‘school night’ is taking it’s toll. gotta sleeeeep……

Over the past few weeks I have been reading a book called “Linked – How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life”. This is one of many books about networks, the Web, small worlds, scale free systems and their ubiquity, complex systems and so on. As you can imagine all of these ideas are linked to each other as well.

For the first time I discovered a link from another web site to this one. As trivial as this may be in function, the connectivity that it opens up is not. You see, the site that linked to this one can be found on Google which means that my page is only 2 links away from the effective center of the Internet.