What makes my blog indecision harder is that Smashing Magazine keep releasing excellent free themes. This newest one, Infinity by yichi, looks gorgeous and I couldn’t help myself. I’ve installed it, fiddled with it a bit and am now going to keep it.

There are no widgets and each post requires a thumbnail, by way of WordPress’s excellent custom fields. I don’t intend filling every post I’ve ever done with a thumbnail (there are far too many to do that) but I might as well attempt to try to cover most of the latest posts in each category. It doesn’t take long to do and the result is rather nice.

The design buggers up the single pages, sadly, but there’s a workaround and as I only have two (my “about” page and my CV) that won’t take long. I’ve also changed the top background image from one used in the Colorise theme, but I’ll eventually create my own. Eventually being the operative word.

I like this one a lot. It’s quite striking and I should be able to customise it to my own ends. Thanks yichi!

I subscribe to the rather excellent Smashing Magazine and they had a great post about textures and patterns in web design a little while ago. Some of the sites featured in that article made great use of backgrounds, something that was somewhat passé only a short time ago. I figured I could use something similar for this blog and went off to BgPatterns to have a go at creating my own.

I made an orangey tile that makes a wallpaper-like pattern over the background. I quite like it and started to faff about with transparent settings in the site CSS along with changing the site width and positioning.

The problem with this approach is that I made quite a few small changes to the CSS without once checking that the site still worked in Internet Explorer. I did most of the changes while working on my iMac so I don’t even have the opportunity to check IE from there anyway, however I got a text from my Dad this afternoon wondering why my blog was being obscured by a large, white sheet of whiteness.

I’d succeeded in buggering it up and this was largely down to my own ineptitude at coding with CSS. It’s also a problem that IE has its own idea how CSS works and most designs have little IE-specific workarounds to cope with this. The template for this design has such a workaround but this didn’t work well with the changes I’d made to the width of the site.

I’ve fixed it now so the site should display almost how I want it to in IE. Somehow the site is centred in IE but I wanted it left-aligned – pretty much how it’s being displayed in Firefox. No doubt I’ll take the organic approach to fixing these problems and cope with them as they arrive.

It’s at times like these that I’m glad I’m not a professional designer.

However, life is starting to normalise again. It turns out that I’ve had three different job offers from our company’s reorganisation interviews and I’m going to be staying in my current post. I’ll be working out of our Coventry office instead, but at least I’ll be employed. I see that as an extremely good thing!

Life just seems to be getting better and better here in Nottingham. We’re not going to be moving away from here even to shorten my commute. We love the area and there seems no point in moving while Jo can get the bus or cycle to work.

In other news I’ve updated WordPress to the newest version 2.6. I even managed to do it with the minimum of fuss for a change without breaking anything. If you see anything odd happening with the site then please let me know. However, I’m intending to mess about with the site template over the next couple of days (and about time too!) so things may well start to look a bit skewiff for a while.