it's not that bad. better than the first redesign attempt. essentially equal to your old design.

perhaps start a contest to get ideas from your readers....

-Posted by me on February 12, 2003 08:22 PM

I like your idea with the ping box - the only other place that has that is LazyWeb, except that yours has a much more focused topic and audience.

If nothing else, I think that you should keep the ping box in whatever incarnation your site becomes next.

-Posted by milbertus on February 12, 2003 10:08 PM

I second Dan's motion.

I really dug the old design (someone has to say that about any new design, so I guess it's me this time). All this extra stuff, (notably the visible URL's) doesn't seem to add much value to the site.

Nothing wrong with experimentation though, especially considering you seem to have a rather resilient audience.

-Posted by Eric on February 13, 2003 02:52 AM

One of the most important aspects of a weblog is that your satisfied with how it looks. If you're not, by all means, do you what you need to do to be happy with it.

Good luck.

P.S. You better keep the icons! ;)

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on February 13, 2003 10:46 AM

I liked the old one, I like the new one. One thing I do miss on the new one is the little bit at t he top where you occasionally featured quotes... "god bless those heathens -- homer simpson" and so on.

And of course the pilgrim hat on the AIM logo. I had to show that one around the office.

As for redesigning, Joshua's right... you need to be happy about it, it's your personal site. :-)

Have fun with it... play some. At least you don't have to worry about low tech browsers... I think it's a pretty safe bet that your target audience ranges from latest and greatest to bleeding edge, so far as browsers go.

-Posted by JC on February 13, 2003 10:57 AM

I drew a new UI last night, and I'll post that soon. I wwant too get the CSS unified and simplfied first. Here's a few notes...

Custom icons will stay, and I'll make a tool for using your own and saving that to a cookie.

Pings will stay, but will not be contained by an iframe. That was a dumb idea to begin with.

The over all page layout is be similar to what you see now, but will be cleaner brighter, and use some more negative space. I'm packin' 10 pounts of shit into a 5 lb bag right now, and I don't need to be doing that.

I'm going to use em instead of px for font sizes and see what happens.

-Posted by Dan on February 13, 2003 11:17 AM

Whenever I redesign a site, a lot of the time I begin to hate it after it's deployed, and don't give it a chance. You may be experiencing the same thing. Hard to say.

Why not let it sit for a week? See how you feel then?

-Posted by Quinn on February 14, 2003 08:15 AM