Welcome

Yep, I’ve moved. You know how you start with a little idea and it spirals out of control? I was tired of the Blog*spot banner, tired of Blog*spot going down, tired of Blogger not working sometimes, et cetera et cetera et cetera. One thing led to another, and, well, here we are. So what’s new? In no particular order:

A visual redesign. Um, yeah, you may have noticed that. I knew that if I was going to get rid of the Blog*spot banner, I’d need something at the top of the page other than just big blue letters in Verdana. Well, I guess I didn’t really need it, but I wanted it. (“Mom, I need a cookie!” “No, you want a cookie. You need to shut your mouth.”)

So there’s a bit more color here than there used to be, and I’ve moved some things around. I also narrowed the main entry window, because studies show that it’s easier to read something when you decrease the distance across which your eyes have to travel. We’ll see how it works. I may continue to tinker with things. I don’t want the design to be too distracting or get in the way of the content. Maybe plainer was better? I don’t know. When the New York Times started printing color photos on its front page a few years ago, some people said it was going to detract from the quality of its journalism. Never happened, though. I don’t really know what I’m saying. Just enjoy the red heart and the upside-down funnel hat, OK?

CSS. Click on “View Source” and you will see that my HTML is now table-tag-free. I’ve been boning up on my CSS skills over the last couple of weeks, and in the process I’ve become sort of an anti-table snob! (Last week I removed table tags from the old page as well.) Table tags are actually supposed to be used for tables of data, not for page layout. Why should McGyver try to open a door with a quarter, a paper clip and a stick of gum when he’s got a key in his pocket? CSS is actually simple once you get the hang of it, as well as more elegant. And it makes your page load faster. If you’re curious, you might want to check out a couple of sites. Glish shows you CSS in action, demonstrating some simple but sleek layouts along with the accompanying code. If you prefer learning from the ground up, I found the Style Master to be clear and helpful.

Greymatter. No more Blogger for now. I was curious about Greymatter and how it worked, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It was a hassle to install it, set it up on the server, and modify all the templates, but maybe it will be worth it. It gives you lots more control over things than Blogger does, and since it sits on the server, I don’t have to worry about a Blogger outage. Actually, Blogger’s service seems to have improved lately — the site hasn’t gone down in a while, and so forth. But basically I switched to Greymatter out of pure curiosity. I’ll see how I like it.

Tinmanic.com. Oh yeah, that. Why did I move? Well, for one thing, you can’t run Greymatter on a Blog*spot page. For another, as I stated above, I wanted to get rid of the Blog*spot banner. (Of course, now it turns out that I could have done that for $9.95.) For another, I wanted a comments system that doesn’t go down all the time. For another… and so on and so forth.

Why Tinmanic.com? Because www.tinman.com, www.tinman.org, and www.tinman.net were all taken, and because I didn’t want a name with a hyphen, and because I wanted a dot-com. So what does the name mean? Take your pick:

1. It’s an adjective. “He’s like the Tin Man… in fact, he’s tinmanic.”

2. It’s a play on the word manic. “He’s not just manic… he’s tinmanic!”

3. Tin Man? I see. (tinman+i.c.)

There’s also a search box, but unfortunately you can’t search any of the entries from my Blogger days. As for the old Blogger entries, I’ll move them to the archives on this site soon enough.

I’ve also added some more of my older writings. These include some old UVA newspaper columns. Some of them seem to be precursors to my whole blog thing. Perhaps being a newspaper columnist is similar to writing these blog entries in some ways.

Oh, finally: there’s a new e-mail address on this page, but it just forwards everything to my Yahoo! e-mail account, so feel free to continue using the old address if you want.

I hope all the kinks are worked out. But if you find something that’s not right, let me know.

Don’t forget to change your links.

And, oh yeah, happy Mid-Year’s Day!