Template fiddling

Since rolling out the new template, I've gotten a lot of comments, with essentially a mixed verdict leaning more negative than positive. I've also noticed things that I liked at first about the template but now don't like as much, and I am starting to appreciate that the circuit board background may be too overpowering. So, if you see the template looking different seemingly at random over the next couple of days, don't worry. It's just me experimenting (and, more importantly, trying to avoid working on my PowerPoint slides for a talk that I have to give on Tuesday, not to mention a paper that desperately needs to be finished and submitted). You may even see a different background popping up soon, or maybe even just a solid background. Hopefully, this process will result in the--shall we say?--the evolution of the present template into a--shall we say?--fitter and more well-adapted template. (I would call it intelligent design, but obviously the intelligence of this particular designer, at least when it comes to web design, is debatable.) In any case, a reader has already helped produce a spiffy new logo to replace the admittedly rather ugly text in the header; so that problem at least should be taken care of very soon.

A couple of layout issues I've noticed. People have told me that the "Webrings" box that should be at the bottom is showing up at the top right for some reason in Firefox. I was able to replicate this on my wife's old computer. As far as I can tell, on the Mac at least, it turns out that it has something to do with Firefox 1.0. Upgrading to Firefox 1.5 eliminated the page rendering problem. The second issue is that, on Internet Explorer at work, I noticed that the text in both the sidebars is center-justified. That was not my intent, and I agree that it doesn't look good that way. My original intent was that the text in the sidebars should be left-justified, and that's the way it shows up in Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, and Safari. I have no idea why this is so. I guess I know just enough HTML to be dangerous but not enough to do serious troubleshooting of browser-specific differences in display. Any help in resolving this issue would be appreciated.

Finally, for those of you who really, really don't like the new format, remember that it could be worse. I could be using the same template this blog uses (found via Pharyngula). In any case, I'm not going back to the old generic template. I'm determined to keep experimenting until I find one that works and is way cool. Basically, it's an excuse for me to learn some HTML and how to use Dreamweaver. Hopefully, I won't cause too much confusion and/or pain in my readership during my learning curve and the evolution of this blog template. Just try to stop me when I finally hit on one that works. I'm an incessant tinkerer and might not be able to recognize it when I've finally gotten it right, leading me to keep working on it and thus screw it up.

ADDENDUM: I decided to apply the new logo and the alterations to the header. (Thanks to C., who wishes not to be given too prominent credit for all her help to me in crafting the header images, lest others ask her to do stuff for their blogs too.) Also, I may have found the cause of the center-justification of the text in the sidebars: A stray "text-align:center" tag in the CSS list for "main." (I can only guess that IE was "listening to" that tag instead of the tag specified for the two sidebars.) I can't determine whether deleting it worked, though, until I get access to a PC. Finally, I widened the center panel and decreased the space between the center panel and the two sidebars. Hopefully this incremental step helps make the background less distracting until I do a more permanent redesign...