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I updated the Blender of Love this weekend, using the new look and feel for the front page. I also updated the work viewing page, so that the comments form is embedded into it. I learned two valuable lessons with that second change:

• Test your new webpages on a variety of browsers.
• Webpages work better when you close your <title> tags. (I mean, it might seem like an interesting conceptual art piece to stuff the entire content of the page into the title, but in terms of making a page people can actually see, not so much.)

I wasn't 100% satisfied with my Blender design, but it was getting to the point where I just needed to put it in there, and consider updating it later.

The design kind of evolved. The first one had the new horizontal and more prominent icon bar: The second try had a new structure that kind of hearkened back to the circa 2000 design: The penultimate draft played around with some stock photography instead of the site's trademark chunky icons: Miller had some good advice through the process. In the end I kind of gave up on hunting down all the "trapped white space" that he warned me about, but still it's better for having tried.

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Quote of the Moment

The rose of yore is but a name, mere names are left to us

Apparently a bit of middle age poetry, according to The Waning of the Middle Ages. I like the hint of Ozymandias in it, along with a whiff of hubris.

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Countdown of the Moment
Bill the Splut posted a link to Time's 50 Worst Cars of All Time. Some of the write-ups seemed odd, almost as if the author didn't actually like cars very much:

The Model T - whose mass production technique was the work of engineer William C. Klann, who had visited a slaughterhouse's "disassembly line" - conferred to Americans the notion of automobility as something akin to natural law, a right endowed by our Creator. A century later, the consequences of putting every living soul on gas-powered wheels are piling up, from the air over our cities to the sand under our soldiers' boots.

It took me a while, but finally I realized the problems... it's not that he dislikes cars, he's just absolutely elitist about it, and mass-produced cars in general. He's kind of like the Duke of Wellington on early steam railroads, " "They will only cause the lower classes to move about needlessly."