Yes Virginia, there is an IDblog. After much pain and gnashing of teeth, I have the new pieces back together. Things that are new: first, there's the new, shorter, more memorable URL (thanks to the MadMan for the idea). Second, there's the new platform. I've moved on from Blogger (which served me well) to the fabulous Movable Type.

After much procrastinating, I paid the paltry sum of $20 to Ben to actually install MT for me. Hey, I put a premium on my time, so even though I've been known to wrestle some Perl code, I just had not gotten up the energy for what is known to be a fairly simple process. But that money was well spent. It got me to the point where the new IDblog was no longer ether, but a real site that just needed some simple tweaks to the template, and I'd be up and running.

Ummm, well, not exactly! Time for confessions. I'm not a designer, and I actually stopped doing serious coding around the time that CSS became something to pay attention to. But I was possessed. This site would be all CSS, and I'd imagined the title for this first entry to be "Look Ma, no tables!" But then I started trying to actually do this site totally in CSS. I had the (are those salmon or what?) and apparently a lot of patience, as I spent an amazing number of hours tweaking. And tweaking. And after I got things just where I wanted them, I headed down for a nice visit with my nieces, and went to show my sister my site. What had looked beautiful in IE5 on the Mac looked like sh*&%t on IE6 on Windows 2000. Argh!!

Well, many visits to the nice W3C validation pages for HTML and CSS later, I had some pages that actually validated. Alas, I was close, but not exactly there. My nice grey right column was apparently quite happily wrapping to the left under my blog entries. Not at all what I had planned.

At that point, I went off to the site of the guru of web standards, thinking I'd find the answer to my CSS woes. Instead, what did I find? An entry that said that, perhaps, just a small amount of table code may be what the doctor ordered.

I was sold. So...there's no "Look Ma, no tables!" but at least I can say "Look Ma, only one table that keeps the d*mn columns intact and makes this much more readable in crappy, non-compliant browsers." Yee-ha!

So, my apologies for this long diatribe when what you were really looking for were the good links to all things information design. I'll try to deliver in forthcoming days and weeks.

As before, I'm eager to hear comments, suggestions for links, why my design sucks (hey, I'm a math major!). Please email me at . The spammers have already found this email address (sigh), so I'd love some real mail to make me feel good. Or maybe I really should assume that the Netherlands Chamber of Commerce gave my email address to them to help them buy arms to overthrow some military force in Zaire. But gee, 25% of $35 million...just think how many months of web hosting I could buy!

Oh, and one other thing. Does this type look large to you? Well, guess what, this is your default font size. Did you really want me to fix the font size at something that would look "slick" (albeit tiny)? Or by default reduce your font size by 20%? Sorry... to paraphrase Dana Carvey doing George Bush (the elder) ... "not gonna do it."

In my copious spare time, I may go ahead and figure out a way so that you can reduce this type so that it doesn't feel like a site for those with vision problems. In the meantime, think of it as a break for your eyes!

08:06 PM | linkme | home