I finally made it to Swing Central again tonight, but wasn't feeling too centralized. There were way too many extra guys, fewer people I knew, and my swing was just feeling a bit on the inadequate side. Oh well. Swing Central so far doesn't seem to inspire me to greater feats of swingingness in quite the same way the Doghouse does, but it still seems like a nice dance. I probably just need to get my swing in somewhat better shape.
Friday Night Waltz is coming up this week, though! Sure can't beat a night of waltzing.
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Monday, September 29, 2003
More Design Stuff
I do agree with everybody that the two columns were a bit much. However, Hugo commented that " 'blogging' should not become 'webbing' as it surely will if double side-bar content also requires regular updates." That sort of indicates why I was considering making the side blogs more noticeable -- they've actually been there and been regularly updated since January. But that doesn't matter too much. I'll stick with the single sidebar.
For the people so far (Mom and Lacey) who like the original: I do think it's been a nice enough design for a little while, but it's just been feeling a bit too flat and dimensionless to me. I like the new designs because they have a bit more of a presence, and are less like a flat sheet of paper.
As for color: The addition of another background color goes along with the whole adding-dimension thing. The original color scheme was really sort of random when I chose it a year or so ago, though it seems to have worked out pretty well. So I kept some of the yellow and tried to work off of that. I would have thought making it more colorful would have increased the "friendliness," but maybe apparently some people see the blue differently. Here are a couple more modifications to the color, as suggested by Tina. I like them, but I think I'd be less inclined to actually use them.
I'd be curious to know what colors people would actually associate with me, leaving aside the current state of the webpage. Tina and I were talking about this a bit tonight. We would both pick darker colors for me, but that makes web designing tricky because I prefer mostly light colors for webpages. Hmm.
Okay, I promise I'll just shut up and pick one soon enough. It's just fun to play designer a bit for a while, even if it's nothing really very fancy.
For the people so far (Mom and Lacey) who like the original: I do think it's been a nice enough design for a little while, but it's just been feeling a bit too flat and dimensionless to me. I like the new designs because they have a bit more of a presence, and are less like a flat sheet of paper.
As for color: The addition of another background color goes along with the whole adding-dimension thing. The original color scheme was really sort of random when I chose it a year or so ago, though it seems to have worked out pretty well. So I kept some of the yellow and tried to work off of that. I would have thought making it more colorful would have increased the "friendliness," but maybe apparently some people see the blue differently. Here are a couple more modifications to the color, as suggested by Tina. I like them, but I think I'd be less inclined to actually use them.
| Choice 5 | Choice 6 | [Back to original] |
Okay, I promise I'll just shut up and pick one soon enough. It's just fun to play designer a bit for a while, even if it's nothing really very fancy.
Sunday, September 28, 2003
Blog Designs
I've been playing a bit with the design of my blog this weekend, and just to be interactive about the whole process (user-centered design and all that), I thought I'd put a few examples up here and ask for input. I'll leave the original page as it is here for comparison. There are two types of changes here. One thing I did was to put a side bar on each side. I liked that because it got more content up towards the top, but I think it might also make it look too crowded. The other thing I did was to change the color scheme a bit. Here are the pages, according to changes:
So anyway, there they are. Leave me a comment or send me an e'mail and let me know what you think. You can vote for one of those choices (or even for the original, I guess) or suggest other modifications to make to them. I'll also mention that I've tested these on three browsers so far, but only on Mac OS X. If something looks screwy on your computer/browser, let me know that, too.
| Original | Same Colors | Different Colors |
| Two Side Bars | Choice 1 | Choice 2 |
| One Side Bar | Choice 3 | Choice 4 |
So anyway, there they are. Leave me a comment or send me an e'mail and let me know what you think. You can vote for one of those choices (or even for the original, I guess) or suggest other modifications to make to them. I'll also mention that I've tested these on three browsers so far, but only on Mac OS X. If something looks screwy on your computer/browser, let me know that, too.
Friday, September 26, 2003
Ergonomics
The other day I had someone at Google come by my desk and set everything up so that it's all nicely ergonomic. We got the relative heights of everything adjusted nicely, and he even got me a Goldtouch keyboard and a vertical mouse. This is very cool. The only complaint I have about the vertical mouse is that there's no way to make it left-handed. I've gotten to rather like left-handed mousing recently. But it turns out I can leave my old mouse connected, too, and just keep one on each side and switch back and forth. It works pretty well for the most part, except for the times I get confused and reach for both at once. (Now it would be really cool if I got two pointers and could actually use them both at once. Though I'm not really sure what I would do with that.)
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