Friday Color Scheme Blogging

[Cute but gratuituous cat picture omitted due to problems with New Blogger (!)]

1. You had to change templates to board the new Blogger and its many improvements, or so they tell me, and that meant discarding color changes (I thought I'd done considerable tweaking on the last one, but then jackd pointed out it was still nearly identical to Kung Fu Monkey). There are, roughly, two templates from which to choose. Okay, maybe a dozen, plus two or three color schemes for each, but a third of them are variations on each other, a couple more look like sympathy cards or personal checks, and one appears to be aimed strictly at the Barbie™ collector. So you pretty much see yourself coming and going unless you get extensive (for me) HTML work done.

2. So I chose one, old layout but new colors. Greenish. One of the promised NEW! IMPROVEMENTS! of the new Blogger was the ease of changing colors. This is the point where I should note that in 1985, back when I was first forced to use one of those DOS machines with floppies the size of a lady's evening bag (having graduated from college the same year the first softwareless Heathkit™ build-it-yerself became available) changing color schemes was the only thing I was good at.

3. So after a couple a' housekeeping chores I started playing with the new color controls. I soon learned that the new controls didn't control every background field, so as I moved farther away from the original green some of it remained, like algae in the birdbath.

4. And this is where we come to aesthetics. I'm a guy. I like to imagine myself an arts-lovin' guy, but still, my idea of a tolerable level of concern with décor is cleaning under the toilet seat once a week. I like green. It's one of my seven favorite colors. But I'm allergic to Lime, and considering the amount of exposure to it the entire country has suffered over the past decade and a half (is it fucking over yet?) it's a wonder I still feel alone about that. And the dark greens just don't do it for me as web colors, for whatever reason. I migrated organically from there to a more earthtoned scheme. It's decidedly not in the range of colors I'd own shoes of, but it felt, if not daring, at least an unexpected choice.

5. It took until last night to get my Poor Wife to get around to checking it out. Her verdict? "It's safe," she said, meaning C, C+. I'm not the sort of student who takes a C lying down, unless I was too stoned to move.

6. I went upstairs to discuss the particulars with her. Which is when I realized, or remembered, that my monitor is considerably darker than hers or probably yours. That's when set to maximum brightness. Always has been, but I tend to forget. I thought the page looked awful in IE (I use Mozilla), and switching to Safari didn't improve things much.

7. So it actually became an Ongoing Project last night, and I can now explain that what looks like Gold or Mustard to you is Café au Lait to me, and that the attraction of the title bar background is that it is #666. Sadly, that's probably headed for the scrapheap, but I do have a new idea I think is pretty good, and I'll try to implement it this weekend, assuming the lawn doesn't take up too much time. I think you'll find it just as exciting as I find the New Blogger.