HTML [0] Design Genius [1] Punjab Mail [3.5] – Part I

Most people, who get weekends off, take weekends off. I’m not one of them; I’ve been to work every Saturday of my career, plus two Sundays and one Labour Day. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no workaholic, I am at my desk on Saturdays, well, for no clear reason.

Anyway, I just took this Saturday off. There was general celebration in the house; my mother drew a long list of items that had to be pulled out of the lofts. Sometimes I think my mother loves me only because I am tall. My dad smiled wickedly, finally a day to take me to the bank, and get me to finish the boring paperwork for some thing that has now been pending for more than a year. Cookie was happy too; she thought maybe I will cook lamb curry on both Saturday and Sunday.

Hah... They were all wrong. I haven’t taken my eyes off the computer for the entire weekend now. Except of course to sleep and go the loo and to do other absolutely essential things like picking up my eyeballs when they popped out from the strain of staring at the screen for seven straight hours. My head is so full of pixels, textures, vectors, Photoshop, HTML, CSS, error messages and low virtual memory!!!

But, here it is, the result of two straight days of tweaking the blog, through countless online HTML tutorials and design freebies… My blog is now completely free of the stupid restrictions that come with every Google template, I control the colour and texture of every pixel, I decide the padding and margin of every header and widget, in short I am monarch of all YOU currently survey. My blog is now, finally, well… mine.

I would like to thank this gentleman and these guys without whose profound wisdom and infinite largesse none of this would have been possible. Also due credit must be given to my mother for getting the driver to empty the lofts, making this weekend’s lamb curry, supplying me with endless rounds of chai, coffee and even cold drink (for which I had to eat Chyawanprash at night.) Mother’s bargain well!!! Also the maid, who agreed, rather reluctantly, to not sweep or clean the computer-side of my room, this was necessary since the process takes her no less than half a day and generally involves her randomly disconnecting the entire computer and threatening its very existence. My dad for, as usual, getting the paper work done all by himself. And last but not the least, Cookie, my dear dog, the time this took was actually meant for her. Definitely two curries next weekend!

Ladies and Gentlemen, ‘the’ slowtumblinglife takes immense pleasure in presenting to you the new look of “The Write for the Remaining Silence”.

Thank you!! Thank you!! You are all very kind! Thank you..

Autographs? No No.. Well, only this one time..

Thank YOU!!!

Initial response seems mixed. Don felt that even though the main header image was ‘singularly engaging and powerful’ the colours were ‘earthen, dull and depressing.’ Well, the blog features a lot of Bihar (earthen), and me (dull and depressing.) Maybe I will use shades of orange and red when I finally move to Delhi or become a film director or both.

BLIMBLOP felt that I should concentrate on the content and not fool readers with blank posts like the last one. And that only ‘losers’ spend weekends designing blogs. And my heart broke completely when she said she liked what she saw of the blog last morning. By that time I had just changed the font of the date header; and the rest of the blog was more or less splattered with the message ‘this image has been removed by the author.’

Anyway, so this is the blog. Feel free to tell me what you think of it.

And I promise not to change the layout for at least a year. But, who can tell, I think I love playing around with obscure textures, vectors and fonts on Photoshop. Maybe, I will take more Saturdays off; finally there is something to do, even in Patna.

POSTSCRIPT - Seems like HTML sneaked in a slimy late equalizer. The wonderful background shade (that hopefully you can now see) was invisible on every computer other than the one at home. This also explains Don's violent suggestion to change the color-scheme. Any way it has been settled now. Enjoy!