My blog has always been multidisciplinary. It once carried the subtitle ‘a place where everything matters.’ Now, I’m shifting away from the rather generic name “blair mitchelmore’s blog” in support of that: welcome to Everything Is Amazing.

Granted, Louis CK’s opinions are slightly less optimistic, but I think that sentiment is worth carrying with you every day. Like David Foster Wallace’s advice to constantly remind yourself that ‘this is water’ it’s something that reminds you of the dangers of succumbing to the status quo.

We’re living in an awesome world, but we’re missing some awe.

I haven’t been blogging as much recently, partly because I’ve been working to read more — I’m a little more than a third of the way through The Stand right now — but another reason is because I’ve been busy tinkering with the back-side of the blog. Specifically, I’ve been writing a new theme.

The purpose is of course to attempt to describe the sentiment of my blog more clearly through its appearance. I’m not a designer, but I think the new look accomplishes that, at least for me. More importantly than that, it was an attempt to take a project from start to finish, something that the string of flights of fancy I’ve abandoned over the years indicates is not something I do very often. Even more importantly than that, it was a chance to see if I could do the whole web-designer thing; I know that I’ll never be a real web-designer — I don’t have the eye for it — but having some sense of aesthetic appeal is useful in my field. And even more importantly than that, it was a chance for me to practice what I preach; I’ve been espousing HTML5 and its semantic goodies for a while, and there are new features of CSS that I think are fantastic that I’ve always wanted to exploit, so this was a chance to work with both of those things.

A consequence of this, is that my new design isn’t supported by IE¹. If you’re viewing this page in IE, it might look like I’m still using the WordPress theme vostok which I’ve been using for quite some time now — if I did my job correctly — and that’s because I special cased you fools so you wouldn’t have to witness the horror that is the new design sans awesomeness. That said, I’ve tested the new design in IE9 and it looks almost perfect so when that one comes out, you’ll be able to appreciate the new design. For the rest of you, I’d like to discuss briefly a few of the features of the new blog I like. Geekery follows.

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Footnotes

1. And all the multitudes rejoiced. [↩]

So I changed the theme on my blog. The old one was a little too busy and I didn’t have a lot of need for all that sidebar content. Granted, this new design lacks the navigation links at the top of the page, which led to my contact me and about me pages, but I can get those back in here later. I’ll find some way to integrate them and maybe a bit of the sidebar content, such as the monthly archives, back into this theme at some point — and if I’m feeling really adventurous, I’ll add a tag cloud since I’ve been using tags on my posts for quite some time with absolutely no visible indication of them — but for now I like the simplicity of this new design. If you hate it, feel free to rant. (Though, really it’s not my design, only my choice of design, so don’t criticise it, criticise my poor sense of aesthetics.)

This now concludes the “I’ve changed the appearance of my blog” post that I swore I’d never write because it will make absolutely no sense to people coming to the site anew.