Posted 9:01 PM by Angie Schultz

Pardon Our Dust!

Please bear with us as we update our blog to serve you better!

Er, well, no. To hell with you. I've been fiddling with the template so it's not quite so ugly. That is, those who choose the dark text on light background will find it's not quite so ugly. The rest of you are doomed to looking at the same old crap. Serves you right, is my view.

But it's late, and I don't have time for further tweaking, so this half-assed effort is all you're getting for now. Deal.

(I can afford to be rude to my readers when there aren't any. That's where I have it all over those more "popular" bloggers. Bwahahahaha!)

UPDATE: OK, think we're done for now. Let me take you on a quick tour of our new features.

First, the banner is now 15% more garish. An increase in garishness was requested by nine out of ten voices in my head.

Second, the side bar has been changed just a little, with new and exciting colors added, and some words removed. I think I added a site to the blog roll too. Remember, if your site isn't there, it's probably because you're not paid up. So get those checks out today!

But the biggest change is over on the day side. Click that link in the upper left to change to dark text on light background. Note that the stupid little black-and-green post titles are now gone. I changed all the titles on the posts now showing, but older posts will still have them (and even older posts will have just lime-on-cream, which is hard to read and will eventually curdle, I suppose).

Now most of the extraneous text on the page is rendered in a dizzying rainbow of brown, befitting the crap it is. I was going for a sort of autumn-y theme, but all the orange and gold was too light to read against the cream background.

Even ignoring the garish banner, I'm not real happy with the light side. What looks sleek and minimalist on the dark side just looks bare in light colors. I might change it again in another couple years.

In the meantime, enjoy changing the colors. I gnashed an millimeter off my back molars getting it right -- well, getting it to how it is now, anyway. So flip those colors! Come on, flip me off! You know you want to.

By the way, if you want to change your personal colors, I recommend Dave Raggett's site. He has a nice table showing the various browser-safe colors.

Annabella has a wonderful HTML help site. Unfortunately it covers what is now very basic, probably deprecated, code, but I still get a lot of use out of it. I think the colors in her browser safe color palette aren't as easy to see as those in Raggett's, but if you click on one of her colors, you'll get some examples of how that color looks as a background to several other colors, and how it looks like as font color on several backgrounds. That helps a great deal in decided whether a color is too light or dark to go on a given background, and I'm sure it was a lot of trouble for her to set up. So onya, Annabella.

UPDATE II: Also now we have special blockquotes. From now on all blockquotes must be boxed for shipping. (Actually, I'm not sure this isn't a tweak too far.)

It's a little difficult to judge what colors are good, especially if you stick to the browser-safe colors. Through some deviltry, the colors that look a bit silly and cartoonish on the big monitor look sleek and modern on the laptop screen. The solution, then, is to look at the blog only with the laptop.