My neglect of this poor old blog has been an ongoing source of shame for me. The meager trickle of new content over the past few years is one aspect of that neglect. There are multiple reasons for the lack of output, but I will save that discussion for another time. Nearly as embarrassing has been the state of the site’s plumbing, which was still largely based on the HTML templates I cobbled together back in aught-three. Table-based page layout may have been acceptable back then, but they’ve been a thorn in my side for a number of years now. I’ve tried, at various points, to move to a tableless layout, but all the solutions I could find either were hacky, or I couldn’t figure out how to adapt them for my needs.

Then CSS Flexbox came along, or more specifically, Philip Walton’s Solved By Flexbox demos came along and finally worked their way through the internet grapevine to somewhere I would actually hear about them (a few months ago). It took me some time to try out Walton’s methods and get confident about using them myself. It took a while more to get them to do more or less what I wanted them to do. And because I was going to be ripping out the guts of my templates anyway, I wandered down some side-paths about improving my typography and some other aspects of the design. Finally I had to dive into the templates themselves, remind myself how they all fit together, and brush up on my rather rusty Tinderbox skills. Altogether, I’ve spent about 3 weeks on the modernization project, but, with this post I can finally unveil my all-new, mobile-friendly, responsive blog layout. Huzzah!

To be sure, there are probably a few rough spots lurking in these pages. I’m still, at best, a mediocre typographer, and I suspect my choice of color scheme is deeply offensive to someone with a more refined visual palate than I’ll ever possess. But as far as I can tell, the new stuff basically works, and I at least don’t have to be ashamed of my janky old tables any more. It’s a start.