It’s Time For A Change

That’s right, baby, I’m on my 5th revision (version 4, since all good computer scientists start counting at zero, of course) of my blog. Long time readers will likely recall the previous incarnations and, if you’ll excuse me a brief moment of vanity, I’ll run through them here. (Click the links below each thumbnail to get a better look at the various design).

“Literal Barrage” version 0
Cropped version | Full version

This design doesn’t quite count as “Literal Barrage” as it was the design I used on my Blogger blog during my first tentative foray into the wide world of blogging. It’s based on nix’s Subdued 1.0 OSWD design. Not much else to say about it other than the fact that I was really grateful to move off of Blogger when given the chance.

Literal Barrage version 1
Cropped version | Full version

My second site revamp (back in the 1.0 days of WordPress) was based off haran’s Tierra Verde Dos. Out of all the site designs that I’ve used, I actually think I like the color scheme of this one the best. It was an absolute bear to get working on WP1.0, as the devs hadn’t yet solidified a skinning/theming API, which meant that I had to alter core WP files and do most of the heavy lifting in CSS which was a huge task as I was a bit of a CSS neophyte at the time.

Literal Barrage version 2
Cropped version | Full version

Revision 3 was based on another of haran’s designs, Gila Two and was originally implemented in a similar fashion to Tierra Verde, namely: I edited the heck out of some core WP files and did a lot of CSS hacking. Around the same time that I switched over to Gila, John Hesch released his port of the template to WordPress’s new (at the time) theme system (introduced truly in version 1.5). I ended up cobbling my site together with a mixture of my own custom code and some bits snagged from Hesch’s work. I still the left sidebar of that theme was very, very slick-looking.

Literal Barrage version 3
Cropped version | Full version

My fourth blog design (the one that was running this site up until today) had Michael Heilman’s K2 at its heart. K2 has a lot of nice features, including the ability to specify custom stylesheets for altering K2 installs in a fairly straight-ahead and simple manner, an ability that I used to draw many of the colors from the Gila design into a more modern feeling layout.
So now we come to this. I’ve been sitting on my new design for this site for a while, tweaking it, teasing it, prodding it and, instead of making it a single person affair, I thought it might behoove me to get the design out in the open. Consider this to be Literal Barrage v. 4.0 beta. The theme is called “Elbee Elgee” and I’ll be packaging it up for release in a little while here – it’s still pretty raw.
I’m very anxious to get you, my loyal readers’, thoughts on this design. Color scheme? Item placement? Bugs? Leave a comment on this or drop me a line. I’ll eventually start tracking bugs over on the issue tracker and if anyone’s feeling really ambitious, they could check out a Subversion copy of the theme themselves.
I’m excited to see where this is headed. I believe that I’ve designed enough flexibility into the theme to allow myself to perhaps even bring back some of the old looks on occasion merely by including a new custom stylesheet (I may end up doing this as a proof-of-concept, should I get the time). I must give credit to Heilmann for inspiring a lot of my design ideas here, Christian Montoya whose Hot Dates with CSS inspired the current dating scheme, Thomas Silkjaer over at The Undersigned whose theme options HOWTO is foundational to the theme backend I am constructing and Alessandro Fulcinti whose Layout Gala provided the inspiration and technical know-how (read: negative CSS margins, baby!) to move forward with the theme.
Note: The very Web 2.0-ish logo at the top was generated with this handy-dandy logo creatr[sic].