The other day Vincent read my last post, and yesterday he saw me staring like a zombie at hundreds of Wordpress themes at 11:00 at night, so my sweet geek took pity on me and offered to give the frogblog a deep pixel massage to freshen her up a bit.

You probably can’t even tell the difference, or at least not consciously. But I can. I couldn’t identify every little thing he changed, but the site has a lighter and more balanced feel to it. Much less stressed out.

Many of the things he changed are in the sidebar. He reorganized some stuff, made the font bigger, got rid of the bold (he says bold is vulgar). Added a title above my three big images so they wouldn’t just be floating there. He made all the reds on the site the same shade (they were like four different colors, but I didn’t really care since there are so many reds in the banner). He says I have too much crap in my sidebar. He’s probably right. But I can’t delete the links to all those worthy causes or, gawd forbid, my fellow francophiles! I’d feel terribly guilty. So just ignore all the crap in the sidebar. That way you can feel guilty and I don’t have to.

The line separating the sidebar from the body was an image, wrong shade of red, so he made it a border, right shade. He made the font for links in the sidebar a light gray instead of black, and the body text font a dark gray. Says it’s easier on the eyes.

The blog title in the upper right corner is now a nicer font and a little bigger. And when you hover over it you don’t get that horrid black box anymore.

And, if you’re still using IE, you’re crazy you may never have even known that I had a sidebar because the content appeared way at the bottom of the page. A little pixel tickling was all it took to adjust my sidebar in IE. (But that’s no reason to keep using it. It’s a malware magnet. Switch to Firefox.)

There was a horrid fat line at the left of every block quote that he made thin; more refined and dainty. Like me. Stop laughing. And he changed the indent. The date above every post title is smaller, and gray, as are the details under the title. Same with the comments-related headers (Leave a Reply, etc.).

As he was working, he repeatedly mentioned that he was changing the spaces between things by a few pixels here and there because the spacing was all over the map. He spent over an hour tweaking frogblog’s pixels! Ecstasy.

Vincent has an artist’s eye and he likes minimalist design, so frogblog is still way too busy for his taste. But all in all, she is reinvigorated and her mood has improved tremendously. I’ll be able to stand being around her for a while longer now.

Thank you Vincent! ;-*

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