Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal.

When I go from hence
let this be my parting word,
that what I have seen is unsurpassable.

Friday 4 July 2008

Designing the blog

I have been trying out various themes for the blog. I want something very simple but elegant. Something in keeping with my "its the content that matters" approach to blogging. If I am writing something I would want it to be easy to read. Contrasting background and foreground colours (black-on-white, white-on-black) without too many decorations are the easiest to decipher. Most themes are too fancy or too colourful or just plain distracting. Also, there seems to be an abundance of themes which center all content in the middle of the screen leaving lots of empty space on the sides. Can't figure out the reason for that. Why not utilize the whole space? The only theme I could find which fulfilled all my requirements is "minima stretch". But I am already using it. So I guess I will have to stick with it. I think all these considerations of space utilization and readability comes from being trained as a software engineer. When designing products our biggest concern is usability followed by optimum resource utilization. Every decision is made keeping these two points in mind. Blogger themes have obviously not been designed for software engineers.
Now for layout. I want to create a website-like look for my blog. Unfortunately, Blogger does not support web-pages like Wordpress does. So I am using simple links on my side bar. Wish I could at least have drill down links from Cuisine to Reviews and Recipes. But thats also not supported. I have also added a visitor counter and a blog roll. The counter is courtesy StatCounter. Its the best I could find and free. I intend to add my favourite blogs to the roll. Looks like I am all set.
Now for the content...

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