It's been a long time coming. It was ugly, and each subsequent hack only made it uglier. The whole thing needed to be put out of it's misery.
I spent about a month sketching out ideas for what I could possibly do to my site to make it not look like I threw it together at the last minute. That process was getting me nowhere, so I decided to drop it and let the ideas just come to me.
As with any design project I've taken on, I started to look at colors. Having had recent experience with the Dust GTK theme, I decided to go for a dark approach. In the past, I've varying levels of luck with dark themes, and I knew that in order to pull it off, I would have to play with shades and not just straight black and white.
Today as I was waiting for the cleaning fluid to work it's magic on my sadly neglected oven, I decided to take another swing at the site. Slowly but surely, the design came tumbling out of my mind and through my fingers into the text editor. This time, I needed to do it right the first time, and not have to tweak around for weeks (or months afterwards to fix awkward glitches. I needed something that I would be proud to show off, and start me on a new design path.
What you see now is the culmination of about 10 hours worth of work, not counting the time spent researching colors and drawing sketches. I managed to knock the whole thing together in one day, and if I may, it does not look shabby at all.
Of course, to get the full eye-candy effect, you need to use a browser that doesn't suck, though it doesn't look too bad on IE7.
And for comparison's sake, here's what it looks like on Ubuntu, using the Dust theme:
I'm open to comments as always, and if anything is broken for you, let me know. Oh, and Opera users: look out for hidden title attributes on text that may or may not cause you to get angry.
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