So yeah, I redesigned, and it looks almost exactly the same. No one was surprised. I make no promises as to the content, but rest assured that the bones of the site, at least, are brand spankin’ new. Something like 8.5% of my crufty two-year old code was reusable. I started out wanting to do away with date headers (as it’s becoming pretty rare for me to write more than one entry in a day, they seemed superfluous), and I ended up with a crash course in just how hard it is to get a blogger blog to look like anything but a blogger blog. To be fair, it probably would be the same with wordpress or moveable type.

Another lesson learned was that I am not a designer. Photoshop was not the first thing I opened when I set out to redesign the site; TextPad and SmartFTP were. I have never in my life mocked up anything, not about to start now. The design comes from the structure, the structure comes from the content, the Tao is all.

My second goal — after I put in the surprisingly large amount of work to do away with date headers and still have something recognizable as a blog — was to make the site somewhat more structural, doing away with a lot of DIVs and H5s and replacing all with DLs. Learn to love the DL. It’s still not perfect in terms of semantics, but I’m not geeky enough to write my own DTD. Though my code would look like <post title="Whee!" date="20060218">Foo bar.</post> if I did.

Dammit. Now I’m not going to get any sleep tonight.