I installed a new theme a while back in an effort to move away from the initial one which was nice and minimalist but full of retina-scorching whitespace. For some reason it didn’t turn out nearly as well as I’d hoped so I’ve made a step backwards a bit and tweaked the layout to display the post text in off-white and lighten the blue in the sidebar. Other little details, such as the Georgia font for the headings and a centrally aligned main menu bar were lifted from the initial Yuki theme (which I was quite fond of, for all the whitespace), while the box-style post dates come from my old blog.
I took a leaf out of Epic Win‘s book and moved the blogroll to its own separate page, to tidy up the sidebar if nothing else. I want to add subcategories to my links to make use of the extra space and organise them a bit better as well – it’s all in aid of looking classier and more readable (unless you read these posts solely on a feedreader, in which case my efforts will be lost on you). There are still the usual niggling details to iron out but as far as I can tell this theme looks the same in Firefox and IE, which is as much as I could hope for really. Not bad for something I threw together in the space of an evening.
To put it bluntly, CSS is a royal pain in the arse and no amount of Muse and Kalafina can sweeten the experience of misplaced semicolons and colours that refuse to behave themselves. The gravatars and comment quicktag boxes are next on my list so should make a glorious return as soon as I can sort them out; feel free to make suggestions and bug reports in the (currently incorrectly-sized) comments form as usual.
In other news, pretty much everything I’m currently watching is finishing so expect the last of Spice and Wolf (squeeeeee), Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 ( T_T ) and even thoughts on Canaan, assuming the last ep leaves enough of an impression for me to actually have an opinion on it. Darker than Black is finally being released on DVD over here now so I can rewatch that before 2009 is out too.
During my week offline I was reliant on reading good ol’ fashioned books to kill time so expect posts on the Crest of the Stars and Haruhi novels – they’re damn good reads but the differences between the originals and the TV adaptations are interesting in themselves. There isn’t much in the new season that’s caught my eye but the DtB second season and possibly the second helping of White Album will be worth looking into.
The rest of my energies at the moment involve the upcoming replacement of my trusty old laptop with a new desktop rig, which I’m planning on putting together and fitting with a Blu-ray drive in the next couple of months. There’s a Top Secret project involved in this too (hint in the pic above)…well, two people know about it so far but I’ll post details when the pieces are in place.
Finally, I’ve never mentioned the subjects of the current banner images either, so here they are:
- Ryougi Shiki (Kara no Kyoukai) deskop; unknown source
- Screenshot from Byousoku 5cm
- A view from Tokyo Tower at sunset that I snapped earlier this year.