Sneak Preview

Yes, I know the current hash of a theme is ugly. I’m working on a completely different theme. Here’s a [sneak preview](http://8stars.org/misc/concon) of what the front page will look like (just an inactive wireframe, still needs work).

I’d been vaguely dissatisfied with several aspects of my blog’s theme even before I recently managed to trash it. Both in terms of the use of space, typography, etc, and in terms of organization of content. In terms of the design-y aspects, I’ve always been an admirer of [subtraction](http://subtraction.com/), and when I read Khoi Vinh’s [“grids are good”](subtraction.com/archives/2007/0318_oh_yeeaahh.php) presentation, I thought “well, let’s give that a shot.

In terms of organization, I’ve started to think that putting the complete text of many blog entries all on the front page is overkill. I’ve also become increasingly comfortable with the idea of what I’m calling “confederated content”—I’m pulling together stuff from flickr, del.icio.us, etc all on one page, and the old organization gives those other sources less weight. I’d like to imagine the new layout promotes them a little better. For a long time, I was uncomfortable with treating these hosted services as equal (I kept my own link-log separately for a long time). I’ve gotten over that. Each of these services offers features that are valuable because they bring a lot of people together in one place, and they’re easy enough to tie into.

Technically, it might be possible to achieve similar effects using good self-hosted software and something like [Technorati](http://technorati.com/) that had been customized for a specific content type and format (This is what RDF was supposed to do for us). it still might happens someday. But until then, confederated content it is.

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