Today, as I was doing some web surfing during lunch, I came upon a link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. I’ve been aware of this site for a while, but never used it, and so when I clicked the link, the very first web address that I searched for was of course Southbound Home, to very amused and nostalgic results. Most links to older versions of the site don’t really render the site design correctly, because the majority of the design was done in CSS files which are either long ago deleted, or moved around on my server, so that the Wayback Machine can’t find them. Sorry, Wayback Machine.

However, one design that did remain was the original blog design, sans images. The reason that this design shows up is because it was all coded within individual pages, or at least using software templates, so that the design is hard coded into the page. As I looked through the old pages, two things stood out to me more than others.

First thing being the level of effort that I put into those first pages and designs. The effort that I put into, and the passion that I have for site creation and design today, pales in comparison to those very first days. In those days, I updated everything by myself. By Hand. IN THE SNOW, BOTH WAYS. Now, Wordpress does almost everything, from the posting, to the updating of books I’ve read, to the About Me, and Frequently Asked Questions pages. Now I post all of my images to Flickr, and link to them in my posts; Back then I uploaded and created a new page for each individual set of pictures. I updated what I was reading, watching, and listening to by hand coding those sections, each time I picked up a new book, or switched to a new program. Even the post comments required a separate application.

If I had to do today, what I did back then, to get the bones of this site up and running, I wouldn’t have a site, plain and simple. I’ve told The Wife this story many times, but back when I was living alone for the last time in my one bedroom bachelor pad in Old Town, I would spend entire weekends sitting on the couch, tweaking little bits of code in every corner of the site, making minor changes that only I could have possibly noticed, and thinking that it was the most important thing in the world that I got it right. I would come home on Friday afternoon, and get on the computer. I would pry myself away about dinner time, and go grab Chinese food, and two or three DVDs, and go home, and get right back on the computer. And then about midnight, or sometimes as late as 1:00 AM, I would head to 7-11, and grab a couple of Red Bulls, and another pack of cigarettes, come back home, and start watching the movies, never really paying attention because my head was buried in the computer again. Bed time was 4:00 or 5:00 AM, sometimes sunrise, and then I’d wake up mid-afternoon,  to do it all again, with the leftover Red Bull and Sesame Chicken. Looking back on it now, it was a little  sad, and a lot unhealthy, to be so closed off to everything else, but I’m also happily nostalgic about it, because it is was so exhilarating, creating something, on your own, for the first time.

Secondly, I notice the writing. I am always my own harshest critic when it comes to my writing. Looking back, I see the same problems that I’ve always had when writing, which is finding my voice, and feeling comfortable writing about topics that are relevant to me and interesting to the people that read my site, few that they may be. It’s a constantly frustrating task to feel confident that what you write is important enough for others to take time reading. Picking through older posts on the Wayback Machine, though, you ican see that same tone and insight in some of my posts that I hope I have begun to use more frequently over the last five years. And I also wonder about some of the ‘series’ that I wrote so long ago, and if they would have caught on if I had continued on with them. My weekly SEC Football Picks every fall were the biggest deal to me back then, but Southbound Home’s Friday Word of the Day could have become pretty popular if I’d given it the chance. Right? One last thing that I did notice, though, is that I seemed to be much angrier back then, and I don’t know why. There were quite a few hostile rants about football, work, and current events in the news. Because of that, and the happiness that I currently have, it’s nice to look back every once in a while, but the past will likely stay in the past.

So if any of you are here regularly enough, you’ll notice that there have been some slight changes to the sight. To be honest, aside from some seasonal changes to color combinations and graphics, this site has remained largely intact from it’s last successful redesign, in the summer of 2007. To that end, these changes are really no different. The overall feel of the site is still the same, with small changes of location for some elements. Overall though, the site is still the same. Almost two years later, and two column theme is still working for me. I’ve even put together some new ideas, and some new layouts, but they just never felt necessary, or really any better than what’s already here.  For now, I hope everyone likes it.

I realized last night that it has been almost a year since my last redesign of the site. Well, ok, nine months, but that’s a long time for me. I also realized that I have about a week until the first day of spring, and I haven’t come up with any spring skin for the site yet, either. Total redesign, or spring theme? What to do, what to do? Maybe both…

Update: Well, we fixed that little problem, now didn’t we? Believe it or not, this is just a spring theme, despite the fact that the site looks remarkably different. So, in summary, Version 8.0, No. Version 7.3, Yes. Spring has sprung indeed. Happy Easter!

I don’t know if this will be the final design for the ‘Save the Date’ cards, but I had a lot of fun putting it together, so I thought I’d share.

When I launched the site’s redesign a few weeks ago, it was only partially complete. It was materially enough complete to publish, and I was excited about getting it up and running as quickly as I could. There are, though, small little tweaks, fixes, enhancements, additions and subtractions, outside of the basic additions of posts, or updating outbound links. As an example, you can see the Frequently Asked Questions page. I wanted to update the look of the past editions of this site, to give more information, and to give it a cleaner look than was employed previously. As another example, though, read the answers to many of the questions related to my content management through Wordpress. They’re don’t make a lick of sense within my current site architecture, and need to be updated. So it’s little things like that that I spend my time on, when I do have a fleeting moment or two to devote to the site, often at the detriment of actual posts. It’s just as important, though, at least to me, as the posts, and so I do those things so that the site can be considered complete in my own eyes. It’s a labor of love, I know.

With that in mind, 0ne of the pages sorely in need of attention is the about page. It has served it’s purpose in the past, for sure, but I really wanted to add to it, to sort of revitalize it along with the rest of the site. To help accomplish this, I e-mailed The Mom about three weeks ago. I wanted to know if she had any older childhood pictures of me in digital format, because I wanted to add a few to the site. Of course, she didn’t. I asked as politely as possible for a favor, the 1,743,597th favor that I’ve asked my mother for since I was born, to be exact, and within a few weeks, after I’d forgotten, actually, I received the gift of twenty-something pictures from all steps of my childhood journey through this world. The pictures brought back memory after memory, but, as anyone from my generation knows when looking at pictures of themselves as a child, it was hard to distinguish, when viewing, if the coloring in the photos were due to aging, or the god awful outfits we were forced to wear as children of the seventies.

After downloading all of the photos, I spent my lunch break at work doing some color correction on the photos in Photoshop, and was amazed at the results. I use Photoshop CS2, and am generally a huge fan of all things Adobe, anyways, but the ease of which I was able to bring life back to the past surprised even me, and the results are obvious, as you can surely see:

The pictures seemed to jump off the screen, to the point that I actually began to think about the implications of such a process. Imagine a world in which history doesn’t fade; where the photo of your great, great grandparents, passed down through the years, can be saved, possibly forever, for future generations. Or where your parents wedding photographs can be displayed at their 50th wedding anniversary, as if they were taken yesterday. Of course, the beauty of originality can’t be overstated, but the safety of a digital alternative, brought to a world in which wear and tear is inevitable, can bring an assurance to those important event that we want to be remembered. Or even those moments where our mothers put us in frilly jumpsuits and gave us girlish hair cuts.

Such moments may not go down as legendary in the annals of history; maybe not even my own personal history, but they serve my purpose now. The update of the about page should be done shortly, and I’ve got a brand new set of pictures, which I’ve decided to share on Flickr for all to see. Some, I like, but they’re all there, even the ones that I’m less than proud of. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be around for a while.

Well, this is it.

I’d like to say that this is what the site will look like for quite a while, but honestly, everyone who reads my site consistently knows that I can’t make this promise. But I do feel very good about this incarnation of the site, for a few reasons. And as always, I want to explain the thoughts behind the decisions that I made regarding this new design, and why I’ve tried to go in the direction that I have. Believe it or not, I do understand that these posts, where I explain the thoughts and processes that each new design goes through, probably aren’t for everyone. They are, however, important to me, if only for archival purpose, and so I choose to put this to pixel now in the hopes that either someone, anyone, gains some insight into my thought process, or, more likely, that I read this and laugh a few years down the road.

I liked a lot of aspects of the previous design of the site, but it was those aspects of the design that I never became completely comfortable with that caused me to want to redesign again. The archival organization of the old site was poor, and it never quite fit in with the design of the rest of the site, a fact that irked me to no end. I was also never quite comfortable with the placement of the most recent post on the front page, and could never quite come to a solution to the issue, because I was very pleased with the placement of the secondary elements near the top of the page. The most important elements of this site, in my eyes, are the words that I write to express my thoughts, and my life, to those that aren’t able to share it on a consistent basis, and the images of the photographs I take, for the same reasons. Everything else is just filler. Just fluff. Granted, it does give more insight into me, my personality, those things that i might find interest in, but it can’t relay any more about me than what those that know me are already aware of. So I wanted to strip away the clutter, and put the focus back on what was important. I wanted something fresh, something clean. Something beautifully simple. So I began like I always do, scouring the Internet for inspiration, and focusing on the structural form of the page, and a header to give it the singular flash of color that I was looking for.

“I wanted something fresh, something clean. Something beautifully simple.”

Inspiration comes from many sources, some obvious, some slightly less so. The right inspiration can bring about something almost magical it hits the right person. The wrong inspiration can bring about a mess; easily forgotten. My original inspiration came while randomly surfing the Internet for some information on one of my favorite musical groups, Govt Mule. I stumbled upon the Bonnaroo ‘07 site, and was immediately struck by the design of the logo. I thought that I had the inspiration that I needed, and so I went to work on a banner for the site, and eventually came up with something that I was initially pleased with. When trying to integrate the header into the structural form of what I wanted for the site, though, it just didn’t work, and I couldn’t put together anything that pleased me, so I went back to the drawing board. Well, mostly, I just stalled, and surfed the web.

I eventually got it right though. I believe I was reading Authentic Boredom when I finally clicked the right link. Cameron Moll’s links to interesting articles, pictures, and other minutiae around the web are something that I check on a pretty consistent basis, and usually provide links to inspiration worthy content, and this time was no exception. I had visited Design Observer a few times in the past, but it wasn’t a regular in my surfing rotation. I was immediately inspired, and began molding my ideas into a form that was an amalgam of the the new inspirational site, and the original header image.

And that’s what you see at the top of the site. As I said before I wanted to keep things beautifully simple, and I tried to focus on that as I continued on with the design (I have a tendency to over-design, for lack of a better word, and in case you haven’t noticed). Basic white was an easy choice for me as the background color, and I decided upon a monochromatic collection of muted blues and grays as a color element. I wanted a sans-serif font, in order to keep with the clean lines of the site, and I ended up deciding upon the Gill Sans font family, with the always sturdy Helvetica as a backup. Finally, I decided upon the Silk icon set for the sidebar elements because of their simple design, and…aw, who am I kidding, there’s a ton of them, they’re easy to use, and most importantly, they’re free.

I made some improvements to how I managed the site, but I spoke about those when describing The Girl’s redesign, so I won’t get into them much at all here. In summary, the changes that I’ve made should allow me to spend more time adding content to the site, and less time tweaking the design, or writing code for some function that I can now perform through Wordpress. But I suppose we’ll have to see how that works out. As they say, idle hands are the devil’s tools…