2006/09/06

Blog Design Woes

Ever since the announcement that they got HTML editing setup and the new template language ready to go I've been thinking about doing a little redesign.

And, man, is it a pita. I've never been one for GUI design, honestly. Move this widget here. Push this thing over there. Wait, not yet. Do this thing a little more. Maybe that should be aligned the other way.

I swear you can do that stuff for hours. Throw colors in and I never actually get anything done since it never looks *quite* right. Their templating language is cool and all, but I find CSS in general to be extremely verbose. Couple that with the amount of processing they seem to do on the templates before it actually gets to your browser and its a bit annoying to figure out where a style is being applied. Not to mention a bit disorienting.

It doesn't really seem like downloading the template and editing it offline is really an option, either. If you try to display it, it just comes up with bits of a page. So, I've been using their online tools and it's been pretty slow going. Click on "Edit HTML" and muck around there, "Fonts and Colors" to set those, then to the other browser tab and refresh it to see what your page actually looks like.

I realize I could just ignore the "Fonts and Colors" friendly variable definitions, but it seems really negligent for some reason. And, I realize "Fonts and Colors" has a preview pane, but it seems to just be a static image so you can't see hover changes etc. Plus, it's cramped way down at the bottom of the view.

Having to use their plain-text editing window instead of vi sure is a drag, too.

Hmm...

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