Note for the Aesthete

As loyal readers will observe, An Excellent Dumb Discourse just received the on-line equivalent of a nose job. No, not because of a horrendous deviated septum. Rather, blogger.com, the bardblog's mommy, just went through a dramatic relauch, and now offers a ton of more templates (in blogspeak, templates are referred to as 'skins'). The reason I refer to it as plastic surgery and not just a change of clothes is that the new skin offers many subtle changes in the way it deals with text and coding.

This is the bardblog's third skin. I like a lot of things about this skin better, but my heart is not altogether content. The big things I like about my new skin:

1. The listing in the sidebar by title.
2. Less orange.
3. More gray.
4. Way, WAAAAY easier to create block quotes, like this list. This will save me approximately a gazillion hours when I want to incorporate sections of text from plays.
5. Probably will be a lot easier to add photos and pictures, should I ever figure that whole deal out.

The big things I do NOT like about the new skin:

1. SOOOOOOOO narrow! My entries looked wordy enough when they extended across three-quarters of the screen. Now the text is confined to less than half the width of the page.
2. The placement of the Comments (too near the start of the previous entry).

To fix the narrowness, I will I either have to change to an entirely new skin, or learn how to do graphical editing to widen things out without perverting the pleasant rounded nature of the bardblog's new corners. It will be very complicated, and significantly cut into the gazillion hours of time-saving I recently realized due to the block quote feature.

And so I expand the debate from inside my own allergy-laden head to the broader bardblog community. (Not much broader, but I like to imagine it is growing. This is one of the ways I lull myself to sleep at night; counting hypothetical new Excellent Dumb Discourse followers. I would install a counter into the blog to settle the question, but I'm afraid I'll never fall asleep again.)

Please share your thoughts, either through the Comment feature below, or by emailing me at bardblog@writeme.com. Just remember, this is about style, not substance. It is not like critiquing the quality of the jokes and awards at the Oscar show. It is like kibbitzing about how everyone is dressed and what a freak Joan Rivers is on the red carpet. Kibbitz away!