Who's a pretty blog! Yes you are! Yes you are!

Ahem.

Alright, so that's not exactly the most dignified way I could have announced what you've presumably already noticed: that Standing On The Shoulders Of Giant Midgets has undergone a massive, belated makeover. Notice, notice, notice. Hopefully, you like? Ja, ja?

There are a number of reasons this should have been done a while back. First and foremost, although I really love dark backgrounds, I'm as aware as anyone (and, yes, have been--sorry) that white text on a dark background increases eyestrain. Have known it since, sadly, shortly after making the decision last year to go with a dark theme. And I've been meaning to do something about it for a while, even before a tongue-in-cheek plaint on Twitter from a friend about somebody else's dark, eye-straining blog. And I'll be honest, the change, which, again, was overdue, I know, was largely the result of having free time this afternoon to spend a few hours picking a template and transferring things over, otherwise I would have put it off again.

Which brings us, not-at-all-paradoxically, to another reason for the change and the lateness of the change: the previous template was pretty awesome in a lot of ways, but easy customization was not one of them. As big a reason for making a change as the readability of the blog was to switch over to a template that should be easier to edit by somebody as clueless about HTML and CSS and the rest of it as anybody. "Werd," the template you're looking at, should be (and already has been) easier to tweak using Blogger's GUI when it comes to colors, column layouts, etc. Which is nice, though I do have friends (e.g. Michelle) who were superabundantly awesomehelpful when it came to modifying headers and things (and yes, those really are words, you can look 'em up). The sad confession I must make about the help I received in customizing the previous incarnation, however, is that whereas my friends sent me wonderful e-mails explaining in thorough detail the snippets of code and what they would do and so forth, all my brain was really able to parse was, "it's MAGIC!"

I know, I suck. I'm sorry. I'm smart about other things. Honest.

Along with all that, there's also the fact that while the previous look was (in my opinion) cool, it was also (and still my opinion here, of course), so very, very, very 2008. Which in internet years is like being really, really, really old, like stinky geezer who always wears the same undershirt every day and has socks with garters old. Which, actually, ties into all of the above: blogs have evolved, Blogger has evolved, etc.

So: the newest version of the blog should be easier for you to read and easier for me to run. Hope you like the new digs.

Oh, and happy solstice, everybody!