Selenay's Ramblings

I've had a lovely weekend, spending much of yesterday at terrylbirch's eating yummy food and watching DVD, after wandering into town where I invested on a book on the Wars of the Roses. Like the geek I am :-)

Today has been largely pottering and sorting through a mountain of paperwork. How very exciting. But at least I've found six months' worth of phone bills and bank statements and removed one of the things that I could have procrastinated with on my exam revision. Er, and procrastinated about said exam revision in the process :-)

Tonight there is not one but two daft crime dramas! Perfect Sunday evening TV viewage. Except for the part where they're on at the same time. I have made the decision to video Midsomer Murders because it finishes later than Daizel and Pascoe :-)

If anyone is interested and wishes to borrow my new LJ banner for their own usage, you can find it at The Haven. It would be much appreciated if you could save it to your own server rather hotlinking to mine, though :-)

And, er, would anyone be interested in a tutorial with pictures of stages and settings in order to replicate a similar (but obviously very different) banner for themselves?

In other thoughts, that tag cloud on the right hand side only shows how much I abuse tags. Maybe I'll keep it as a warning to myself!

So I've taken the plunge and installed one of the new Expressive layouts. It looks rather swish, I feel.

Things I like:

1. You can change almost anything through the CSS
2. Fiddling with the CSS is surprisingly easy, particularly if you've got Firefox's web developer toolbar installed so that examining the source CSS is easy.
3. I've already been able to adjust the text size to make it readable without lots of resizing - woo!
4. The form for replying to comments works much better than my old layout's.
5. Blue text for links in the main body, grey for other links. Between that and the userpics, there is enough colour to be interesting without being blinding.
6. Expressive has some really lovely layouts and there were half a dozen that I almost chose before setting on Urban Noir.
7. Having a link to edit posts from the main page rather than having to go through the toolbar on my About page or click into the comments.
8. Ditto for the tags. And adding to memories.

Tweaks still to do:

1. The grey link text is a bit too pale for easy reading - already spotted where I need to fiddle with the CSS to override this with a darker shade, though.
2. Possibly hide the tag cloud, unless I've got used to it by the weekend and can actually see a point to it.
3. Design a new header for the page to make it properly individual - I've already worked out where in the CSS I can insert this, so all that I need is to actually make it. Methinks Painshop needs some work tonight.

The list of tweaks will undoubtedly grow, but I'm already liking the fact that I can tweak and adjust the layout easier than I could with the old one. And the colours are much more soothing than the old ones :-)

Also, I am supposed to be doing some work but my email is down and it's boring work. Bleh. Is it home time yet?