Winds of Change

If you're an unhealthily avid Hamfisted reader, you've probably noticed that I've been slowly but surely piping across my picture galleries to my Flickr stream. This is all part of my site redesign, which I began back in January. I finished up the overall design in February sometime, and realized pretty soon afterwards that I'd need to do a bunch of work before I made the changeover, or else I'd be doing even more work, and it would be a terrible mess, or take forever, or both. Every gallery I moved to Flickr meant a gallery I wouldn't have to redo on the main site, so I was saving myself time in the long run. It sure didn't feel like it, though.

So now the last gallery is done, and I can finally get started on actually converting the pages across to the new design. It's very different from what's there right now, but it has numerous advantages that will, in all likelihood, never be noticed by anyone other than myself. Do not be expecting some swanky, ultra-lickable, Web 2.0 curved edges masterpiece though, as I am a programmer, Jim, not a graphic designer. I worked closely with those black-beret-wearing Mac lovers for my two years in Vancouver, and although I learned a number of things from them, the big lesson I picked up is that I'm just not a designer. I tried instead to concentrate on consistency, spacing, readability and good underlying code, and told the angled gradients, stacked transparencies and pulsating neon squids to go and get buggered.

The new design should be live in the next couple of weeks, as after that I should be in Sydney and supposedly getting a job, which means no more infinite free time for assing around with the silly thing. It's certainly taken a lot longer than I expected, but that's probably a byproduct of my anal retentiveness attention to detail and propensity to become easily distr... ooh! Shiny thing!