On the End to an Era

Last week was a rough week at the office. Publications went to press, additional projects surfaced like sharks, and by the time Friday rolled around I was well and truly fried.

As were many of the rest of us in the department.

To take my mind off work, I thought about redesigning my website.

Long-time Allynologists know that I go through periods where I redesign my website like a crack-addicted monkey — trying this, doing that. I’ll spend hours scouring WordPress template sites, CSS template sites. I’ll download dozens of ZIP files, I’ll look at code, I’ll look at screenshots.

I knew I didn’t want a full-scale redesign. I like the underlying Tarski structure. I thought about implementing a feature I saw in a different design, a different way of formatting the post metadata like tags, categories, and post date, and adding that to the way Tarski outputs the content.

But then, when I sat down yesterday to do it, I had no real enthusiasm for it.

I wrote the necessary code. I uploaded it, tried it, and…

I didn’t like it.

I think I’ve reached the point where my enthusiasm for website redesigns has passed me by. I’m content, generally speaking, with how things look. I like the presentation. I like the flow.

If I redesign again, it will be to a magazine-style layout. But that’s well into the future.

That’s not to say that I won’t spring the Retro Weekend again, where the world rocks out to John Fogerty and my website looks like something out of a decade ago.

But for the nonce, I see no compelling reason to muck around with my website design.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

One thought on “On the End to an Era

  1. Who are you and what have you done with Allyn??? 😮

    Ha, I actually know what you mean. I’m tired of it too. I spent so much time working on my last redesign, and tweaking and getting things to look right in IE and Firefox, that by the time I was finished, I decided that enough was enough. I have a “platform” now, and I’m sticking with it. Sure, I may change the color scheme a little- red instead of blue, for example- down the road. But for now? Nah, this is the site for a long time. I’ve just invested too much time and adjusted my workflow to account for thumbnails, etc., to go back to anything else.

    In short, I’m tired of tweaking. I just want to write the content now.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *