The dawning of a new age

It’s hard to believe that sometime during this month, I will have been maintining this website for five years. That’s legendary for blogs that nobody reads. But maybe things will change this year. I’ve forgotten the site’s birthday/anniversary for like three years in a row, so I guess it’s time I make up for that. To celebrate, here’s a fresh coat of paint! Also, a lolcake.

I’ve still got a long way to go to get things all up to speed (never finished the last redecoration, and there’s still stuff to move over from the old Angelfire site), but we’re off to a good start. Everything looks crisp and extra-virginal in the new white theme. I’ll admit that it does seem a bit sterile, whereas the old black site had more personality, but the white look seems to be going out of style, and everyone knows it’s hip to be behind the trends. Or, I think that’s how it works anyway.

The first thing I would like to draw your attention to is the new NAVI Bar. It’s a pretty basic sidebar, but nicer-looking and with Engrish flair! You’ll notice that the rollover does more than just change the link color too. The spacing trick is a small touch, but still nice to look at, and if you hold your mouse over any link, a short description will pop up!

Eventually I hope to streamline most of the site to match this page, much like I had intended to do with the old layout. News archive pages will be stripped down to the base blog so that I don’t have to worry about maintaining any time-sensitive things like links. I have no idea what I’m going to do with the articles page, but something will happen. And if you hadn’t noticed, I’m still working in HTML with some help from CSS stylesheets. This could all flow so much easier if I were to take the time to learn PHP, but frankly, I know I’ll lose interest before I can make any good use of it. If anyone were willing to volunteer some time to make at least the main blog and articles page stream together nicely, that would kick ass… but I’m not asking or anything. It would totally have to be a “from the goodness of your heart” thing.

So yeah. All the articles will be stuck into this stuffy layout too, somehow, so if you don’t like it… Well, that’s a problem. You have to admit that it’ll look nicer than the randomly cobbled together pages I’ve got going now. Oh, and you’ll get a cookie if you can tell me which site this layout is inspired from. The last one was ripped almost directly from an old GorillaMask layout, but this one is a ripoff in spirit alone. I reworked the code for it all by myself.

Speaking of code, that’s the last change, as invisible as it may be. It’s not quite up to standards yet, but I weeded out a huge amount of useless tags from the index code, and cleaned up what was left a little. You’ll still get a headache trying to figure out what’s going on in there, but it’s better.

So that’s it for now. I’m not sure what the next few years will have in store, but hopefuly they’re more productive than the last year has been. Jeez, I must have published like, two articles this year? Oh well. At least the place looks prettier now.