Blogging in Style...

My blog is too beautiful for words now that it's all dressed up. I stumbled upon this theme contest, and lo, I did find something that was passably suitable.

Close Seconds:

  • Zen Minimalist
  • Yaaarr! Tis me blog!

A case for SVG

An interesting things about the implementation of the theme: The "boxes", left and right are not simply block-level objects with red backgrounds and white borders. There's a single container div with a repeated backgrount image which includes the background color and borders. Also, the deeper red that the content sits on is not simply a background-color css rule, it's composed of a single vertically-stretched, horizontally-tiled (I think) image. I'd have preferred the former, but this wouldn't have given the nice left-to-right gradient on the page, and top-to-bottom gradient on the background. It'd be interesting to do this with a few lines of SVG. Why? Well the short answer is, I don't know how to use the visual graphics programs to make a pretty gradient, and nor do I think I should have to. If you take a look at how simple these graphics are, they can be described simply and easily by people without art training, so it would be nice if they were creatable by people such as myself as well. Unfortunately, the support isn't there, yet. It is, however, in the latest version of Firefox, which you should use for plenty of other reasons.