If you’ve been here over the past few days, the more astute among you will have noticed a few things different. Normally I don’t write about site changes, but I think this one is significant enough - as the biggest single design change to the site since its inception in current form - to warrant a post. The changes include:

1) It’s wider. I’ve been designing for 1024 wide screens for quite a while now - Dragonblade (defunct), Epta Astera, Campus Crossroads, NetUtopia (what ever happened to that anyway? Sheesh) - in fact, this was one of the last 800 wide designs I ever did; almost three years ago. High time to bring it into the future, I figure.

2) The Header is different. I’m not a fan of change for the sake of change - I change because I believe things can be made better. The old header, after a while, came to seem very unbalanced - both horizontally and vertically. This header, while using the same themes as the last, balances itself much more nicely than the last, and comes in a good 44 pixels shorter, saving valuable vertical space (and bandwidth; it’s a pretty wide image). This newfound balance also led to…

3) The navigation has moved! No longer is it in the sidebar, but in the header. I believe it’s much more prominent and accessible there. The sidebar as it was was the only holdover from the last incarnation of the site (anyone remember the gray bevelled border? No? Good) - in almost exactly the same form, though with a black background and different icons. But they were Apple’s icons. No points for originality there. And though they were nice icons in their own right, they didn’t match the theme of the site. I briefly considered a horizontal navigation, but the treeline doesn’t lend itself well to that. Moving them into the header also reclaims a lot of wasted space up there, frees up vertical space in the sidebar, and saves bandwidth by getting rid of that image there.

4) There’s a Twitter there… Yeah yeah, fad, trendy, whatever. For a long time I’ve wanted something like a tumblelog on which to post quick, short thoughts (a Youtube video I enjoyed, a band I just discovered, etc.) - separately from the flow of the rest of the blog, which is more for longer articles. Twitter serves that purpose well enough, and, why the heck not? If it’s trendy, that just means more people to connect with - which is definitely a plus with this sort of thing.

On the backend, 5) It’s completely Wordpress powered. No more static PHP pages patching into the Wordpress loop from the outside. The entire site - pages and all - are all Wordpress now. This brings a few disadvantages with code flexibility, meta keywords (I imagine there are plugins for that), and permalinks (working on getting those fixed - hopefully old blog links should work soon) - but these can for the most part be mitigated, and it brings in a whole host of advantages like pages now being searchable (!) and (so much more) ease of maintenance.

There will be many tweaks and refinements over the next few days and weeks, so if you notice anything strange or broken (like the contact page [UPDATE: Contact page works!] - that will hopefully be up again soon, and work this time), leave a comment and let me know so I can fix it up.

Over the past year I’ve been playing around with musical composition, and I think the result is finally ready to go public. It goes by the name Epta Astera (Seven Stars in Koine Greek), and consists of influences from gregorian, medieval, neofolk, black metal, post-industrial, and a few other musical styles (varying from song to song; it would be pretty difficult to stuff all of that into each one). Check out the website www.eptaastera.com for more information and to download the album.

The new website for Campus Crossroads, a church on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just gone live. From their website:

This site moves the church away from their previous flash-based website hosted at Sitecube, a seller of “designer websites”, to a multi-user Wordpress installation that will hopefully be much easier both for the visitors and the staff to navigate, and much more conducive to frequent updates.

Notice a difference between the screenshot of iTunes 7.2 on the left and an unmodified iTunes 7.3 on the right?

That’s right, it’s actually iTunes 7.3 on the right. Apple has given in and changed perhaps the most offensive new element of the new iTunes back to the round blue shade of its predecessors. Whether this was from the collective disgust of iTunes users or Apple arbitrarily deciding that it didn’t like the dark highlight after all (the same thing happened with iTunes’ search field several versions ago, when the dropdown menu made a brief disappearance), I can’t help but feel that it’s a small victory on behalf of those of us who dislike the post-Aqua direction Apple’s interface design is headed.

But if you’re like me - not (completely, at least) satisfied until Aqua is returned to its former glory - there’s AguaT 1.2.6 hot off the presses and ready for the new iTunes 7.4.1.