New Look

I’ve spent a fair chunk of this week learning about CSS and WordPress, because I figured both of those could come in handy, so here’s the new site design for your delectation.

It’s almost entirely aesthetic update. The banner heading is from one of my own photographs, taken at Bristol Uni’s Botanic Garden earlier on this year. 

For the colour scheme, I used the excellent colr.org, which is very cool: you feed it a picture (you can grab one straight from Flickr) and you can just double-click on the funky colours it picks from the photo and bam! One list of web-friendly colours with their HTML codes, right there.

I’m also happy with my cute little insectoid bullet-points, which were a five-minute burst of inspiration with the GIMP. All the graphics were done with the GIMP; I mocked up the entire site in it before I started the coding.

The only part I really properly coded from scratch was the main navigation bar, so if it doesn’t work, that’s why :)

As well as all that, I’ve updated to the latest stable WordPress release.

This is all part of a preparation to turn this blog a bit further towards actual journalism and writing, rather than just writing about them. A few times recently I’ve wanted to write about something but didn’t really have an outlet, so this is going to be that outlet from now on. This is liable to lean towards the geeky, and may involve rants about usability, witterings on digital photography, and generally tech-related chit-chat.

Hopefully having the outlet will encourage me to get the writing done; it’s easy to leave something half-finished if you don’t think you’ve got anywhere to publish it. I need all the practice I can get — and I don’t care if blogs are the new vanity press.