what's so impressive about a diamond except the mining?

by mg at 07:31 AM on May 04, 2005

Am I at the right website?

The answer to that, today no more so than any other day, is probably not.

So, here it is, the long awaited "something big" that I promised last week. Pretty shocking, no?

It probably isn't that big, really. I mean, websites redesign every day. But it truly feels monumental to me for a lot of reasons that probably mean nothing to anyone else.

1) To begin with, this site has not been redesigned in 2+ years. In the first two years of BS I went through 7 redesigns, and over the last two years there have been none. That last design was certainly the better of any that had preceded it, but I was sick of looking at it. I'm sure I'll get sick of looking at this new design as well, but at least now I've got a couple month window that doesn't make me physically ill every time I type http://www.badsamaritan.com into my browser.

2) In the past year or so I must have started on close to (or more than) a dozen redesign attempts. It got to the point that this nagging need I had to redesign was keeping me from actually writing. I had begun to felt like every time I sat down to write something for BS, what I really should have been doing is redesigning BS. Hopefully, now that the redesign is up, when I sit down to write something for BS, the only nagging feeling I'll have is that I should be spending more time with my wife and kid.

3) The color schemes (especially the red, blue, and yellow) and the pixel-type for the nameplate have been fairly consistently used as design elements for this site since it began. Part of the problems I'd been having with all the other redesigns has been trying to work within the constraints that forced on me. The "ah-ha" moment came when I realized, "Hey, this Bad Samaritan brand isn't Nike, Coke, or John Deere, you can do whatever the hell you want with it." So, I decided to forget the past completely and just try to do something new and cool and that I wouldn't mind looking at every day. I think it is all those things, and more, but what about you guys?

4) No tables. This new design is all CSS. Not only is it all CSS, but it 100% valid CSS. All of the HTML is valid too, if you don't count all the junk the Moveable Type adds. On other tech-geek fronts, the really heavy javascript (several hundred lines of code) that ran the dynamic menus (recent comments, on this day) is gone and replaced with about 20 lines of new code and some semantic(ish) content. What that means is those menus should appear much quicker and wont break for stupid things like quotation marks in a post title.

5) That little bloggy column over there on the right (----------->) is new. When BS authors used to say they felt pressure to make everything they wrote here brilliant, I used to scoff and tell them that it's just a stupid website, write whatever the hell you want. But lately I've been finding it hard to find the words. Half of it is being so tired when I get home I don't have the energy or creativity. Half of it is having a toddler toddling around. Another half of it is the redesign nag mentioned above. But the biggest half of it was feeling like I didn't have anything interesting to say and no ability to express anything interestingly. That thing over there (-------->), I hope, will keep me (and any other author who'd like to participate) in the habit of writing every day and help make writing the kind of life-stories that have always been BadSam's bread and butter, easier and less painful.

6) That little bloggy column over there on the right (----------->) is important for another reason, too. There have been long stretches recently without new stories. I thought adding a couple new authors would help that, but I should learn by now it's never that easy to fix a problem. Having a more "bloggy" area in addition to the main stories will help keep the content fresher and hopefully encourage more frequent visits.

There are still some tweaks to be made and all feedback is appreciated. But I needed to get this up today rather than wait any longer for all the reasons mentioned above. Plus, I had one of those "It's the last day of class and I haven't done homework or studied all semester" type dreams last night, and just figured I'd hand in my homework today, even if it wasn't finished rather than suffer through another one of those dreams tomorrow.