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We have nearly finished our least-noticed website redesign: the appearance has hardly changed. By changing a line in a RubyJournal template and adding a line of Ruby, each permanent link in the weblog now has its own file, its own title, and its own new location.

Sensing your high level of interest, let me push onward. The whole thing reminds me of Ben Willmore's exhortations in chapter 11 of his great book, Photoshop 7.0 Studio Techniques [buy at amazon] . (by Ben Willmore).

Chapter 11 is about shadows: how to create them, how to separate them, how to enhance them. How do you know if you have done a great job with the shadow portion of your photograph? One clue is that no one notices. It's so sad, but the shadow masters are never recognized; with shadows, no one ever says "Hey, bub! Nice shadows in that photo!"

Please say nothing.

What's great about weblogs? If you're too busy to write, sometimes the web can help you out. That's certainly true today, as I link to Meg Hourihan's graph (www.megnut.com) which proves the point. Meg's graph shows the relationship between 'busy' and web writing ('posts').

Isn't visual stuff great? Here's the link to 'Rather than 1000 words' : Busy vs. Posts Graph by Meg Hourihan

thanks, Meg, you saved me about 938 words!

It took a long time but thedailychannel.com (this website) is finally an all-CSS based web site, with the exception of one or two tables where CSS wasn't appropriate.(CSS stands for 'cascading style sheets', a way of specifying appearance and typography for a web page, outside of the actual page itself. In this way a uniform appearance can be applied to an entire site. There are other advantages, too.) The goal, only reached after after much experimentation, was getting all the pages to display more or less as intended.

The impetus for this onerous project (onerous only because there are so many different pages on this site) was a fine book on CSS and other topics: Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization [buy at amazon] by Andrew King -- accompanying website at websiteoptimization.com

Eventually I'm sure we'll reap the benefits of this forward-compatible approach, but at present it just seems like I'm out of purgatory. On the plus side, this website has a uniform appearance across all its pages for the first time since it started up back in 1996, and when you click on something it ought to show up while you're blinking, so look twice after clicking.

So, woop-de-do. Now I'm going to go read some funny books. Stay tuned for the results!

More site redesign, more bennies. The latest: I have re-discovered three music reviews I had totally lost track of: Norah Jones, Bonnie Raitt, and Paulo Moula. I know that you have probably heard of two of them: you really ought to check out the third.

Here are the links to all three reviews:
Paulo Moura [reviewed on thedailychannel.com]
Norah Jones [reviewed on thedailychannel.com]
Bonnie Raitt [reviewed on thedailychannel.com]