Seven Red

Q: And because both cars were made by GM, were they both available in metallic mint green paint?
A: They wuh!

The bloglect has become atrocious. Ah, what can one do? In my defense, it is the usual very hectic close of an academic year (yes, early May people, we’re still going here), and that comes with a fairly predictable set of distractions. Primarily, you get many students who have been – let us say – otherwise lax in their efforts suddenly showing up at office hours like “What do I need to do in this course?” They seem at times unaware that the assignment sheets, syllabus, and course calendar have been posted on the course content management system, which they can access from the comfort of their own Dorito-strewn apartments. They also seem unaware that there is a course content management system, which is exceedingly strange, since that’s where all  the course readings are, too. You also have the more interesting problem of wrapping up everything for the year and getting set up for the real work of writing during the summer, which you will no doubt do ten hours a day, just as you planned. Third, you get this weird service ramp up as all the outlandish projects promised by various committees in January suddenly face the uncomfortable necessity of delivering up some, well, deliverables; since you’re at the close of the year, you also get all kinds of events that require attendance, because every level of committee is trying to mop up before everyone disappears. Where these people supposedly go in the summer I can’t imagine, but there does seem to be the sense of “You better do such-and-such now, because nobody’s going to lift a finger again until September.” I mean, huh? Finally, and more locally, we had a pretty egregious tenure denial within my small Home Unit at Unnamed Employer Institution, so that’s taken up much mental, emotional, and physical energy. Sometimes the banal really is evil.

So, first and foremost, I was getting so disgusted with the last design that I decided to run through a redesign, which you’re looking at here. I just wanted something plain and airy, like a light salad at lunch, so you’ll have to tell me if I succeeded. This summer, I’ll likely do a ground up redesign of this site and another one (about which more later), really starting from blank pages and coding up the XHTML, CSS, and PHP from scratch. This current design is version four of what was once the WordPress Palam theme, mixed with parts of the first theme I used. It still has some of the basic CSS, but I’ve made so many modifications that it really is removed from the original theme.

I like coding. I wouldn’t say I’m very good at it, but I do like it. I don’t even check any WYSIWYG portions anymore. I just hand code and test out on my local server. When I first started my diss, I used to scoff at these programmers who always talked about coding all night and just being in a zone with it, but I definitely got that after I started doing it myself. It’s just more results-effective, if I may coin what sounds like a typical management term, than other kinds of writing you do in my profession: change a line of code, run it, and ta-da, it works, and you solved a problem! I can see why that’s attractive. In any case, for this theme, I kept the basic structure and appearance, mainly switching out the images. This was much easier now that I’ve received – and it’s like a dream – my deeply discounted copy of Adobe’s CS4 Design Premium. I heart it like I haven’t hearted a product for years. For the next redesign, since I’ll be building the template from scratch, you’ll likely see more more in the way of changes, since I want to evaluate every element. But now that I have my summer lunch salad of a design, that probably won’t happen for a while.

But back to work. I have a pile of usability test reports with my name on them. No, literally. They have my name on them.

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