Web Design

If you switch to the new holiday template, you'll see what my happy hell looks like --complete with home-made gluten-free chocolote chip cookies.

Yes. I am that kind of mother.

Which is why my happy children conspire on a daily basis to deny me of my right to be a depressed, sullen, angry and resentful bitch. They force me to be happy and grateful.

Bastards.

Such is life.

Such is the hell I've chose to live in.

Last week was one of the most intensely intellectual and emotional weeks I've had so far this year. It was a great week for exchanging great ideas with some of the most interesting net evangelists doing advocacy work in the United States.

Whether it was talking about impeachment in Philadelphia, describing the state of the feminist blogosphere in Barnard University, inspiring ethnic media publishers and policy advocated to turn to the blogosphere or brainstorming with the political technorati at Rootscamp; it all has been incredibly good and intellectually stimulating.

Yet this week was also marked by the emotional jolt of Lorraine's loss. The death of her boyfriend has been so overwhelming to me that I haven't been able to read her posts about it.

It's the first week though that, due to all the traveling I had to do, I really reckoned with the reality that my kids are better off now in school than with me homeschooling. I have been in denial since September about them being in school and I am just starting to grieve our separation.

So, why am I writing this? Well, I almost never get to write anything personal these days. At least that's how I feel. But also, I wanted to talk about what I do when I'm overwhelmed and grieving : I use cooking and web design to do what some people describe as work meditation, when others talk about active meditation.

I switched to the old design for the sake of all the AOL and IE users who insist on not using Firefox. You unfortunately are in a majority of visitors to this site.

Please, please, please switch to Firefox for momma's sake.

Look at it as a donation to our site : For every Microsoft IE user that switches to Firefox through our button, we get one $1 from Google.

That's right people. Leave that horrible, non-standards complaint browser, and you'll help pay for our work in the process.

If you are a Firefox or Safari user and want to use the new design, go to your account and switch to template culturekitchen_red.2.

How do you switch to a different design? Go to this forum topic to find out.

And as before, if you would like to follow my web design process, you can switch to culturekitchen_red.3 (especially for those who are using the the evil empire's browser.

How do you choose a template separate from the default one?

1. Go to your account page
2. Hit edit.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page.
4. Select any of the available designs from the list.
5. Save your new configuration.

Rinse and repeat if you would like to switch back or choose a different design.

Thanks for everybody who has alerted me of the problem reading this site on those incredibly crappy IE and AOL browsers. I am working on fixing the problem.

In the meantime, though, would you consider please, please pretty please, switching to Firefox?

Thanks. You're just peaches.

UPDATE!
I'll leave this post on the top of the site until we deal with all you IE users. Unfortunately, the solution is more complicated than what I had thought at first.

Earn your webangel wings. Switch to Firefox.

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So what's new?

I switched the navigation and blogging tools menus to the top of the sidebar on the left. Since they are collapsible, you can just open and close them as you need.

Hate it? Love it? I want to know it all.

Before you go on hating though, I want you all to know that this was more than just an exercise in designing a Drupal site. I am trying to find add more space to make more visible the work and interaction of regular members. I want to find ways of making visible the way people interact in the site --so it's not just the front-pagers who get featured and highlighted.  

Here's what I feel about it at the moment: It's busy. I do like the new molotov-guy design. I do think that the actual logo (the word culturekitchen) could be much, much smaller.

What do you think?