Russell Beattie

I ended up doing a Fry's run with the 24HL guys last night (Mike, Diego, Martin [who needs to update his blog enough so I can find it again]). Then we went off and played Project Gotham Racing on Diego's massive TV, so by the time I got home I didn't have the energy to mess around with my blog. I may have to buy an XBox 360 when it comes out, PGR2 is really cool and have you *seen* the specs of PGR 3? It's going to be insanely cool.

Diego mentioned that I'm starting to sound shrill on my blog. "SHRILL?!?!" I screached, "I'm NOT SHRILL!!!!" and then realized he might be a bit right. We spent a small portion of the evening talking about how insane I was on my blog - if I was really as black and white as I seem in writing, I'd probably be locked up. Diego specifically mourned the Enthusiastic Russell of Old. Hmmm... Okay, I'll work on it.

So! Yes, I agree with everyone that says the default WP theme has to go. So I popped a wooden back panel on the top (like one of those retail stores with the windows boarded up? Get it?) so you can visually distinguish the blog and haven't done much else. I'm kind of hesitant to go back to my old theme just because change is always nice, but then again when other bloggers change their theme after a year or so of reading, it's always a little jarring. Like someone moved homes or something and now you keep expecting to see the old one and get the new place instead.

There are some things of my old theme I want to keep though - Font sizes weren't defined, so that each reader can decide on their optimal reading size. Max Hedley left this in my comments yesterday:

Hadley’s rule: All web site redesigns, and all blog platform changes, must involve to a smaller, less readable font!

Heh. That's soooo true. Though I'm using FireFox which will ignore the font size if you want it to (unlike IE the last time I used it) I know many people either can't or don't change font sizes. Even I bump up the font size on a lot of blogs because I'm either reading it on a large screen or don't want to go blind. So that'll change, definitely.

As for the rest of the site, I'm not sure. A year or so ago I was really into that "super clean, spare look" that was easy to design because there was nothing to it. Now I'm thinking that some of these really, really hyper designed blogs are preferable. The design of the blog says a lot about the author, though, whether we want it to or not. Something that seems super-professionally designed signifies that the content is going to be super-professional. A default WP, Blogspot or MT design signifies a newbie. And something unique many times signifies an old-skool blogger (which is what I think my old design did).

So my design skillz aren't exactly up to par with Simplebits, but that's the sort of high-quality design I'm leaning towards. Maybe I should use some of my YPN Ad Revenue (which kicks AdSense ass, by the way) and hire a designer? Hmmm... Email me if you're interested. How much does a new weblog design go for nowadays? :-)

Okay, work stuff calls.

-Russ