Spent a few hours this weekend restyling the blog. I’m almost satisfied with the new front page. The internal pages and archives will have to wait. They’re still functional because they pull from the style sheet, but I have to shift attention to the other, more pressing work I’m doing this summer or it will mount into a punishing backlog. More about that soon.

The latest design makes better use of Cron rebuilds. I’ve installed MT-Twitter (Brandon Fuller, I.O.U. $10), created a blog to archive the activity stream, and then ported that blog’s contents to the EWM front page using the multiblogs feature. I’m still on the fence about Twitter. Not sure I will do anything worthwhile with it (I haven’t adjusted to the different signal-noise ratio, and I’m not certain I want to). But I have an archiving process in place, just in case.

I also created a new logo, new banner, and new favicon a couple of weeks ago. Is. helped me, which explains the spectrum of yellows. And then I dumped some of the clutter (calendar, Google Reader shared items, etc.) and shortened the horizontal navigation bar by making better use of a thin above-banner menu with various app icons. I customized the graphics for the search form, too, but I might redo those when I have the chance, make them slightly smaller. I’m not satisfied with the banner, but I plan to return to that and the other unchecked tasks later on.

If you have any impressions (wow! or sux!), I’d love to hear them. It’s still very much a work-in-progress, but I’ve tried to make the most of since it’s also a way to avoid my other, more pressing work in progress.