As some of you may have noticed – those of you not only reading the feeds but actually visiting my home page –, it’s appearance has changed significantly. I’m using a fixed size layout now that’s somewhat wider than 800 pixels. Till now I have always used layouts that stretched as wide as the browser could display without scrolling. The problem of those flexible layouts is that the lines of the texts become rather long and the paragraphs sometimes rather short – both looking bad and straining the eyes.

The new title of this blog is originally inspired by “The Lord of The Rings”. The first idea was to have something like “There and Back Again - A Nerd’s Blog”. Well, I had the idea to confess that I’m a nerd from the beginning. If you have followed my blog closely over the time, that should be no revolutionary confession, though. So why not state the obvious? But after browsing the web I found some other blogs having similar titles.

At the same time I was hard at work at coming up with a nice title, an idea of a title image came to my mind and finally I made it real with Blender. I have played around with raytracing software for the last 15 years or something like that. That’s probably because my drawing talents are not as good as I’d like them to be. A 3D program enables even the inept in drawing and painting to create something that looks nice. Blender is a nice program. It’s interface needs some getting used to, but it has been improved greatly over the last years. Now you nearly don’t need to know any keyboard shortcuts to get going.

Back to the design: The two images you see at the top and bottom of the page are two different shots of the same moment in an animation. The shutter used here is somewhat wider than normal creating the nice motion blur effect. It’s a rather sparse scene - some cubes with rounded edges that may be buildings and some weird vehicles that are only flat and don’t have any decorations. That’s my view on cyberspace.

So after creating the image, the current title came almost automatically into my head and here we are. When titles becomes the topic of my thinking, fonts also do. Having a fitting title is only part of the story. You also need some good font that helps transport the message. OFFSITE is a nice collection of free fonts. The only thing it lags is a search engine that would allow you to search for fonts with a certain theme. So you have to browse through the fonts till you find something of your liking.

I’m now using somewhat more meaningful file names for the individual archives. It’s not 000066.html but new_design.html now, but because cool URIs don’t change I have written some RewriteRules to make sure that the old permalinks really stay permanent and and can be used without any change. RewriteRules are a bit tricky but once you undertand there workings they are a really powerful feature.

As I began thinking about the new design of the site I also decided to set up a new blog. This new blog is written in German and is located at robertbeeger.de. It was quite easy to design this one since the structure resembles the one of this site very much. There’s a different slogan here and the colors also are different, but that’s all CSS. Notice that the borders around the menus and posts are done only with HTML and CSS. No images are used here. On the German site I used the “grooove” CSS-border that looks really nice here.