The times, they are a changing!Ever since upgrading to "Blogger Beta", their new and improved "2.0" service, my archive links have been broken. Since I had to fix this anyway, I decided to sit down for a day and totally redo the blog. I can hear the shrieking from here ;) Why? The old template (the graphical look of the thing) was a Blogger standard template, from their choice of about ten. In 2005 when I started this thing, there weren't many pipe blogs and I picked the template that looked the most "pipe-ish" to me. But, in the ensuing year, it seems that EVERY other pipe blog has picked the same theme! It was a great template, I admit, but I wanted something uniquely mine, so I spent today hunting around for new templates and graphics.
In the process, I've learned a bit more about CSS, which is always a good thing, and have further customized the site by adding in a "Recent Comments" listing over to the right, which will display a running commentary of the comments left by visitors. So, somebody leave a comment! It looks ridiculous with just my "Testing" query. I'm not sure exactly how much of this template will be permanent - It's highly customizable and easy to replace various graphical bits, so I'll probably play around a little with the color scheme and especially the main page graphic, which currently looks like we're exceeding our maximum warp factor, Captain. Oh, and the Recent Posts and Archives links are all fixed again, so there's plenty of pipe-ish meandering to browse through from 2005 and 2006.
One quick pipe pic to post tonight - This is the first morta of the year, and it's a Talbert Morta Signature no less, with a good briar-sized bowl. I doubt that it will be available for sale, as various people have inquired with me about larger mortas so odds are it will sell direct.
Please leave your comments and let me know how much you hate the page redesign :D
Trever,
ReplyDeleteI like the new design - keep up the great work!!
Great design and great logo for the The Pipe Blog !
ReplyDeleteJPM
Hi,
ReplyDeleteIt certainly looks like you're off to a good start. Looks great, but I've dabbled with CSS enough to know that the devil really is in the details.
So, if you're really redoing the whole thing ... May I suggest you add a little line (or two) in your CSS file, for the paragraph?
text-align: justify;
That makes for prettier wrapping.
text-indent: 3em;
That's something you can't do in regular plain HTML, and can look nice. You may like it, you may loath it. It will make a difference -- now if I only could get it to work on my site, I'd be quite happy :-D
Cheers!
Corneel.
I'll try that, Corneel, and thanks! Granted, it will have to wait a bit, because I've now fully exceeded my allotted non-money-producing pipe work time for the month, but eventually..... ;)
ReplyDelete