Design Maintenance

Notice anything new ye few, ye happy few who read my ramblings? Behold the new layout.

Blogger came up with some new templates recently so yesterday I played around with the template.

I'm quite keen for maps, a fondness shared by my father who never met a map he didn't like. When on road trips, we used to joke that we were in real trouble when Dad brought the map out. But when I knew I'd be driving around Ireland, the first thing I did was buy a map. Still have it too; I love that map. My mom bought me a TomTom for my birthday and I had her return it (one of the rare times I exercised my desires on a gift already given) because I'd prefer to figure a route out myself (and I wanted the new Kodak color printer). So when I saw the new map template, I thought, wow, blogger actually got something right.

I really dislike blogger and only remain here because I'm too dang lazy to transfer to wordpress even though I know it's heaps and heaps better and easier to use. I'll get there soon though and until then, I'll just keep playing with the template. I started out with a standard one for about a year that I never really liked, too unexciting, and then instigated the light house motif last summer. Now I'm segueing into map territory – here be dragons for sure. I like the thematic implications too, almost as though this is a place yet uncharted where I tap tap along at my keyboard writing whatever comes to mind and sometimes unwisely posting it here, but there you go.

Which is where ye few come in. Weigh in, will ya? I'm not crazy about the salmon background but I like how the map looks on it. The trick is getting everything to show up on a light background without resorting to too heavy a color for the text and accendiaries. I don't like web sites with dark backgrounds. I'm not writing paranormal here so I don't need the dark and stormy night implications. And blogger gives you a color palette to work from and though I'm never quite happy with the choices, I do what I can with what I'm given. I'm also trying to keep from simply making everything reds and blues and be done with it.

I do see myself biting the bullet in the near future and getting official about this web site stuff. Until then, it's trial by error, still working out the blog kinks and changing the look to suit my mood at any given moment.

Let me know what you think of my latest attempt at design maintenance.