I’ve been working on a redesign for the site for quite some time now. Well “working on” implies that it has been a constant effort. In reality it’s been sporadic at best. I wanted to do a redesign because the site was too bulky. There were too many areas that required updating that I had neither the time nor the inclination to maintain.

So what’d I do? I threw away everything but the blog. That’s it. That’s the site. I’ve done away with all the extraneous crap that was taking up space and nobody ever read, anyway. Eventually I will add back the photo albums. However, I won’t do that until I figure out how I want to handle the assembling and publishing. So for now, it’s only the blog.

I decided to stick with the basic color scheme and banner from the last incarnation (incidentally, all the old posts are still around), and only made some minor layout changes. To be honest, I’m not terribly happy with it yet, and there may be some additional tweaking that happens. Or possibly major overhauls. Same thing. Right?

Blogger is my current tool of choice, and I am giving some of its more advanced features a shot (listen to all the Moveable Type users out there laughing). Besides the refined visuals, some of the new features on Music-Slave.com include:

• Each post now has it’s own post page, for permanent linking (click on “link to this item” to see a post-page in action).
• The site now uses conditional blogger tags to provide varying content between the main, archive, and post pages.
• The site now uses Blogger comments. While Enetation has been very good to me, I decided to give Blogger’s comments a whirl. I feel strongly that the comments I receive add a lot to each post. By using Blogger comments, I am ensuring that the comments will always and forever (unless my hosting company blows up their server) be tied to the post. Also, I can turn on the feature where blogger sends me an email when a comment comes in. So the bottom line is: easier for me, no smileys for you. So sorry!

As always, I wanted to give credit where credit is due. The following resources were immensely helpful in creating the new design. While it doesn’t look like much, parts of it were a real pain in the rear.

Smooth Curves in Photoshop, by Jim Amos (@ Graphikjunkie)
Faux Columns, by Dan Cederholm (@ A List Apart)
W3C Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Specification

I’m done geeking out now, and will come back with something entirely mundane and/or entertaining at a later date.