hope that does it

I don't know if it's because we have a pretty day here and I'm starting to think of spring and change, but I had to do what has become almost a yearly ritual--change my blog. :-)

I started blogging in July of 2006, never dreaming that I'd actually keep up with this. I had the one of the typical starter templates that suited me fine at first, but then it became.... well, boring. Not to mention that I'd often see other blogs with the same design--that was just not right.

After about year and a half, when I'd decided that I'd probably keep on blogging, I changed the design of my blog by tweaking the Blogger Minima template. I used a variation of my original header, and since I was now using a bigger flatscreen monitor with lots of real estate, I made my blog wider, too. I know that it probably annoyed a few folks with smaller screen resolutions, and I was sorry about that, but I wasn't fond of the really skinny look that I'd see here, and I do have to look at the thing fairly often. I've noticed that the majority of my visitors do view at higher resolutions, so I didn't feel too badly for too long.

So now the urge has come on again. I've thought about making a three column blog, but I like my wider sidebar and if I use two of them then I'm stuck with a fairly skinny column of text and photos again. Unless I wanted to annoy more people and widen things even more, that was out. I've tweaked my original template so much that I don't want to even try installing a premade template, and wow, but there are some really fun ones out there!

My compromise? I designed a new background for my blog this morning. I think it makes my blog look a little more up to date, at least I hope so. I made it using Paint Shop Pro and brushes that I've collected since I first started playing with PSP about 10 years ago now. Once I finished, I looked up how to keep my background fixed on my blog, and I was all set.

By the way, since I hate to leave without imparting at least one fun tidbit of knowledge, I checked how my new background would look in various screen sizes. I remember that at one point I had a simple application for doing this, but now I've found that you can just put a command into your address bar, assuming that you have javascript enabled for your browser.

Type in: javascript:resizeTo(800,600)

The numbers inside the parentheses represent the screen size you want to check. That's just one example. You can change it to whatever you want. Hit enter and it should resize your browser window to that size. I think my Firefox javascript settings are pretty restrictive and it doesn't resize for me, but it works in Safari, which I often use for previewing anyway, and it works in Internet Explorer, too.

Okay, let's hope that will take care of my urge to tweak my blog any further so that I can do some crafting. :-) Hm, though now that I look again, maybe my header could use some updating....