Just completed the annual redesign of the BugPowder weblog. Well, annual in as much as I last did it a year ago. Back then it was my first real attempt to get to grips with CSS and over the months I’ve become more and more embarrassed by it, especially compared with my own site here which I’ve been constantly tweaking. The problem was I’d coded it with my HTML head on so it was utterly inflexible meaning any redesign (other than changing the colours) would involve a total overhaul. Which is what I’ve now done.
In essence it’s just a copy of this site with some little tweaks (the sidebar is on the right). I initially rejected doing this as it seemed a bit of a cop out but then I figured since this site works and since I’d spent so much time on it I might as well exploit that. At the end of the day it’s just another weblog layout, there to serve the content rather than to be the end in itself, and it’s now a lot more flexible should I or anyone else want to tweak it a bit. In all it probably took me four or five hours to do, and most of that was spent figuring out the colours (not my strength), re-jigging the external content feeds (such as the TRS2 reviews) and figuring out what order the sidebar contents should be in.
And now I can look at BugPowder and not cringe, which is all for the good.