seeing as how Extreme Makeover won't answer my letters any more and refuse to even entertain the thought of making me look like George Clooney (apparently there "isn't enough money in the world"), I decided to perform an Extreme Makeover on my blog instead.
It's still very much a work in progress, but I like how it is looking do far. I am using as few graphic elements as possible (so far, an rss icon and a form background image), and have based the layout on a modified version of Blueprint 0.5, which is an older version of a really cool css framework that I have been playing with recently. There is a bit of Jquery, and I am pulling my thoughtleader posts in through a filtered Yahoo Pipes JSON feed. My "Side Notes" column on the whole page is my 5 most recent posts tagged "Notes" on Delicious, and is also pulled in via JSON
Speaking of Yahoo Pipes, it really is a useful tool. I built all sorts of feeds like my taking my last.fm recently listened albums and marry that up with album art and add referral links to it. In the end it cluttered up my blog, but I will probably find a way to include that all on here sooner or later.
As I mentioned I used a modified version of Blueprint for my layout, and ended up using a 10 column grid. This image shows how the grid works. The whole blog runs on Community Server 2007, which frankly is way too large for a single blog. I hope to convert this blog to Telligent's new CMS, Graffiti, when it is finally released. Nervertheless, Telligent have done a great job with their theming tools (Chameleon), and it was much easier than designing a CS 2.1 skin. IF there is sloppiness in the XHTML and javascript, it is all my fault, and I will clean it up later, I swear probably.