Yes, this is 1.0. Anything before this didn’t count.

Truth be told, I really didn’t intend to release it at this point, but… well… I didn’t want my archives to skip a month. Yes, I really am that superficial. In fact, I pulled a Vista of sorts to get it out the door in time; I had to cut a few features, including search. Guess they’ll have to wait until Service Pack 1. But I digress.

Yes, I’m aware that this doesn’t appear to be much more than a visual refresh, but believe me when I say that if that were the case, I wouldn’t have bothered. The experimental part of this should become more obvious as time goes on, but you can already find traces of it if you know where to look.

I should mention that “my” idea is heavily inspired by Greg Storey’s entry, entitled “Boxes.” An excerpt:

Before there were blogs we had websites. Beautiful, random websites that felt more like a zine — one page looking nothing like the one before or after it — or Wired magazine back in the early days when Jane Metcalf was art directing. Clicking through a website hosted on Geocities was like playing Russian roulette with your eyes but those horrid pages with disco backgrounds, flaming horizontal rules, and BLINK tags would look more like art today than poorly designed website because we’re so used to seeing boxy newsletters (this site included). Content was in free-form, one page might contain a paragraph set in headline tags and the next would be five pages set in nine-point type. Sure it was sometimes frustrating but it certainly wasn’t boring. Today’s content-tied-to-ads web is very bland in comparison and we desperately need to rediscover the ways of our old, accidental bohemian community.

Or as Jeff Croft puts it in “Five things I’m doing to get better at web design”:

We rarely design pages — we design templates.

Not that there’s anything wrong with designing templates.

Okay, I lied. Maybe there is. If there wasn’t, I obviously wouldn’t be where I am now. I really wish I could expound on this more, but alas, Finals Week approaches. All I can say at this point is that I hope this experiment will prove a success, despite the fact that I have no idea what kind of “success” I’m looking for. But… we’ll see.