Logo and Color Change

Yesterday sucked. Work was an "interesting" day and my car broke down on the way home. Well, at least I wasn't killed by blue ice falling from an airliner passing overhead. I was able to work out some frustrations by designing a logo for this blog - finally moving off of the plain old styles that come with whatever brown-ugly template I was using.Today at lunchtime I was able to actually place the logo up on the blog.

I am from New Orleans and that is part of Louisiana's bayou country...so I picked a "swamp font" for the logo and worked some style crap on it. The font's name is "it came from the swamp". Gators and algae are greenish, so I flipped around the colors a bit.

I may still tinker with the background of the text. We'll see. I like that parchment image. I may even tinker more with the background image.

Anyway...I was sick of the brown, sick of the day and could not sit and paint miniatures. Scotch and photoshop were the order of the evening.

Oh, the car is fine now. Timing belt broke. I was only a mile from home and on a back road...if it was going to break, that was a good time. Ten minutes earlier I was on I-25 in rush hour traffic. That would have sucked tenfold or more!

Dynamic Views for Blogger

Maybe you know, maybe you don't - but if you are using Google Chrome as your browser you can install a plug-in that creates dynamic views of the blogs you visit (if the blog is a "blogger" site). This makes viewing a blog a really fantastic experience!

Go here to get Chrome. Then go here to get the plug in. Once installed, and when you are on a Blogger site, you'll see this in the upper right of your browser...

When you choose one of the options, the display of the blog radically changes - and in so doing, makes the consumption of the blog really a wonderful experience. Seriously, if you frequent many blogs, do this, you'll love it. It is a great tool to explore the many posts of the blogs we love!

I'll show you some examples of what it looks like to convince you. I'll use my friend Greg's blog. I'll show the views I like most...starting with the "Flipcard" view.

In this view, each blog post is represented by an image that was in the post. If there was no image, then the title of the post is shown in a little gray box. If you hover your mouse over an image, it flips over and reveals the title of the post. Obviously, clicking the image (or gray box) takes you to the post itself. Awesome stuff.

If you like things a little tighter, then maybe the "Sidebar" view is for you?

Posts are neatly listed on the left and the selected post is displayed on the right. Click stuff to drill in. Sweeeeet. In similar style is the "Timeslide" view.

The more recent a post is the larger the display. You still get a nice view of titles and text of the bloggers most recent sharings. Click stuff to drill in. Waaaaay groovy.

I think my favorite is the "Snapshot" view.

In this view, which is very similar to the "Flipcard" view, you see all of the images from the posts (instead of just one) and you see the title of the post (no need to hover) and you see how many comments were made by viewers on the posts. Also, if you do hover over an image, you get a little preview of the text (see the first picture in the second row of the above image? That's the preview). Click stuff to drill in. Yeah!

Well, I hope you try this - I love it.