With more than one hundred html documents, nearly three hundred images, and thousands upon thousands of words, Long Pauses was getting a bit unwieldy. If I’ve done this correctly, the redesign will help in a number of ways.
- CSS — God bless Cascading Style Sheets. My main goal in this whole endeavor was to make better use of CSS, giving me site-wide control of formatting. More than a hundred pages and not a single <font> tag to be found. It’s a thing of beauty. I originally planned to design everything with CSS, even abandoning nested tables, but there were just too many browser issues. One of my earlier designs absolutely exploded in Netscape 4. This one is a good compromise, I think. Not bad for an English major, eh?
- Variety — That gray background was getting old. This design, as you’ll see in the coming weeks, allows me to change the entire look of the site in about two minutes. Should be fun. So, if you don’t care for the current Long Pauses banner (bonus points if you can name that film), be patient. It will change often.
- Content — I also wanted to continue paring down the design, focusing more of my efforts on the content rather than flashy images. I’m hoping that you’ll find the new format more readable, and it should print more accurately, too.
- Spring Cleaning — Revisiting every page gave me a much-needed opportunity to fix broken links, check spelling, and clean up fat code. At times I was also tempted to revise history — to edit some of the writing that no longer seems quite as insightful or clever as I once imagined it to be — but I fought the urge. The only links I didn’t check are those from my blog to external sites. I’ve always assumed that most of them would break. It’s just the nature of this beast.
- Blogosphere — Since I launched Long Pauses, the Internet, along with many other media and traditional journalism, have been reshaped by blogging. This new design reflects that change to some extent. My blog now looks and functions more like others, including the addition of permalinks (Karen!). I decided against making it interactive, though, for several reasons that aren’t really worth sharing.
- Experimentation — Long Pauses will always be a blank canvas, of sorts. If I were able to draw or paint or sculpt or create in other ways, I probably wouldn’t spend nearly so much time sitting behind a computer. But I can’t, so I do. Hopefully it’s worth the effort.
So, what do you think? I’m guessing that an assortment of bugs and CSS quirks will reveal themselves over the next few days. Let me know if you stumble upon any. Unfortunately, blog updates will continue to be few and far between for the next week to ten days. Things are a bit hectic around here.
Thank you for reading, and thank you especially to everyone who has sent kind notes over the last few days, asking for updates. I genuinely appreciate it.