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October 13, 2003
Template Games
I've just taken a few cautious steps towards playing with the appearance of my blog. I like the changes that Jason and Anne have recently made to their blog templates. The privileging of the calendar on my blog by placing it at the very top of the right column has always bothered me conceptually, especially since recent entries and recent comments seem more relevant to frequent (or even infrequent) visitors to my blog. The original placement of the calendar also felt a little impersonal, but I think my template seems impersonal anyway (in part due to my lack of confidence in my own HTML skills). I don't really like having the "contact" section so near the top, so perhaps I'll add a short self-introduction. The bottom now looks a little cluttered to me, but I'm still thinking about what I want to do with the calendar and the archives sections. Any suggestions about changing the "look" of the chutry experiment?
Posted by chuck at October 13, 2003 1:37 AM
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Comments
You know, the MT calendar has always struck me as deadwood. It does offer a visualization of blogging patterns, but I'm not sure how useful such a feature is. Matt and I deleted our calendars a while back.
One easy way to refresh your blog's look is to change the background and text colors (I do like the drama of the black, though.) But from there you could move on to more advanced CSS design . . .
Posted by: kari at October 13, 2003 12:04 PM
I'd noticed that several people had deleted their calendars, but I have to take these things slowly. I think it does clutter things up, though.
I *may* change the colors. I liked the black initially for the same reason you did, but for some reason, it now feels a little "cold" to me. Plus one of my students suggested that he found it difficult to read against the black background. In part, I may be looking for reasons to procrastinate on job market stuff.
Posted by: chuck at October 13, 2003 4:06 PM
I dropped my calendar for the very reasons already mentioned. What would be cool, however, would be if one pre-posted future posts in, for example, a course site, and then displayed all three months of the semester using that calendar function so that students could look ahead to what was coming.
As for colors, your background is really charcoal, not black. Check out how the banner at the very top is black in comparison to the background on the rest of the page. Nit-picky, I know.
Posted by: George at October 13, 2003 11:26 PM
I was wondering about that. It shows up as charcoal on my school computer (with a black banner) and as all black on my computer at home. Just forgot to mention it before.
Posted by: chuck at October 14, 2003 11:07 AM