So I've gone and redesigned the entire site. The effort to do so started about a year ago, with off-and-on efforts since then. The motivation was largely aesthetic and to some degree functional. The new site also reflects a lot of my learning over the past year or more about web standards and css (cascading style sheets).

Some of my primary influences in the new design were Daring Fireball, kottke.org, and Subtraction. I've tried to achieve a modest level of originality while taking a lot of ideas from other sites or standard approaches.

And now, remarks on details of the new design that will probably be of little interest to non-geeks:

• I took the idea of entry dates on the left from the default Tumblr template.


• I've finally done away with categories in favor of tags--the categories have been all but useless for quite a long time.


• In redoing the sidebar I tried to choose elements that would be, well, of use to readers. "Below the Fold" are the entries that have most recently fallen off the front page, compensating for the lack of pagination of the index.


• The element I agonized over the most was the Calendar. Few popular blogs have this, because they tend to post more than once a day. For me it's always been a quick way to see how frequent my posting has been, but even that is lacking at the beginning of a month, and the utility is questionable to readers. I doubt anyone ever clicks on the dates to see the entry from that date. So if I can manage to post consistently for a while perhaps I'll remove it.


• The master archive index turned out to be the biggest hassle. I really wanted good usability for this page. I liked Subtraction's approach of showing individual entry titles for the last few months, and then a less granular view of all the preceding months in the blog's history. The difficulty of this gave me a new appreciation for how much effort these guys have put into their sites. The key plugin turned out to be MT-SomeDays, but the documentation is pretty awful--the only example code it contains is a recreation of the calendar, which is already included in Movable Type. By the way, you'll notice on the Subtraction page that after the granular view of the most recent few months, those months are repeated in the overview with all the less recent months. It seems this is impossible to get around with what's currently available, so I separated the two elements more to make it less obvious.


• The static non-blog elements of the site, such as the music pages, "reading room", and access to the whole rare word dictionary, are not linked from the home page for now, and still have the old look. These haven't been updated in a long time, and get very few visits, even compared to the blog. At some point I may try to bring them back into the fold.


• Some other plugins that helped me: Amputator, which properly encodes ampersands for XHTML validation, Compare, which enables some conditional logic in templates based on comparisons, and Archive Date Header, which also helped with the archive index.

That ought to do it. Please do not hesitate to let me know if you see any problems or have any feedback on the design. I've given it a once-over in IE 7 and Safari as well as my home turf of Firefox, but nothing exhaustive. You can see the old index and the old archives page for comparison. Hope you like it.