The Man in Brown

So, apparently, the last thing I wrote here was a rant about GAME; I suppose the experience must have been pretty traumatic, as it happened over a year ago and I’ve only just recovered enough to write something new. I’d like to say that I’ve spent this gap year doing interesting and exciting things, but I’m afraid that mostly I’ve been dithering, faffing, and generally otherwise mooching.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time designing a new Joeblade, and I was quite pleased with what I’d come up with so far until I realised that I wasn’t actually writing anything, and no amount of dicking around with fancy layouts was going to matter. I say I was pleased, and I was. I’ve picked up a few new design skills from sitting near the designers at The Guardian, and I’d been messing around with grids, tag pages, a cunning system of article categorisation, different templates based on the size of the image associated with the article…all sorts of crazy shit. There was even JavaScript, fading bits in and out in a pleasing fashion.

The problem was, this was a basically never-ending project; I was effectively trying to reimplement The Guardian website in WordPress, and whilst that was quite fun and challenging, it was going to take forever and then I’d only be updating it about once a week anyway. It would really require multiple authors writing regularly to justify the scale of it all, and also, probably more importantly, an actual readership.

So instead, here we are; a modified WordPress theme that just shows all you really need: the text. One day I’d like to revist the big fancy, but not today.

So, is anybody still here?