I hate redesigns. Much as I acknowledge the need for them, they tend to drag out, getting all sorts of crap (see the recent posting Everything is detritus for my musings on digital crap) thrown in.

And yet we do them. You are, theoretically, reading this post in my "v4" design, if you're reading it off my website. If you're reading it through the feed, well then you're lucky, I guess.

epcostello.net v4 in some ways is similar to my previous designs, but also a major change. Under the covers I'm using the Yahoo! UI Library. Implementing the structure of the design was quite easy using YUI. But getting the CSS right… well, that was a nightmare.

I have been coding CSS since, well, forever, and I still find myself getting tripped up by weird little things where sometimes it's enough to specify element.classname#id to apply a specific behavior to an element/class/id combination, and other times I have to specify a whole chunk of the DOM hierarchy. It's almost enough to drive me back to using <table>s, but not quite.

So I've been slogging at this for well over six months and decided to just push the damn thing out, even though it's not finished yet. See, over there, on the right? There's supposed to be what some people are calling an attention blog or tumbleblog or tumblelog. Well, it ain't finished yet so there. 'Sides, no one really cares to know when I'm walking the dogs, right?

The bottom of the page has all sorts of additional link things including all of my social networkingy links (except Facebook, which I have been assimilated into).

So, still a few kinks to work out but hopefully this holds. It's not like an Infoworld article will force me to do another redesign. Again.

Oh, and another thing: the site looks like Crap® in Microsoft Internet Explorer. I'm not quite sure why and I'm tired of trying to figure it out. If it bothers you, use a browser from the 21^st Century.