From the ashes

Now that I have settled in Washington, and finally have a real Internet connection, and will be returning to work after a month of being ineffective, I figured it was time for one last major change before settling down to life as normal again. Yes, that's right, I decided it was time for my annual web site redesign. (Take heart, MK, that I didn't decide to do my annual Leeber rewrite instead!) Anyway, my site redesign was inspired by two things...

The first is that I've been meaning to move to blosxom for some time now. One reason for moving to blosxom is that I've outgrown my home-brew blogging system that I started with. Also, my home-brew system was written in ruby and I've since become a dedicated perl fan. Finally, Ben Tucker is on blosxom now, and I can't let him have all the fun!

The second bit of inspiration was that I'd stopped by the CSS Zen Garden yesterday to check out the new designs there. All of a sudden things fit together: zen-like CSS-based web design and blosxom, "the zen of blogging". So, one sleepless night later here we are, with my new zen-inspired design.

I think part of why this graphic motif struck me is because it's a little virtual island of peace amidst the turmoil of recent events in my life. However I doubt that the zen is here to stay. My goal is to start cranking out new designs in a fashion similar to the CSS Zen Garden, so that hopefully neither visitors nor I have to tire of seeing the same design on this site all the time.