Almost Six Years

...since man with black hat began publishing. In the hallway and conference room meetings of our Research and Development Laboratory, we've been giving serious thought to the next six years.

This weblog uses a standard "Blogger" template designed by Douglas Bowman entitled "Rounders 3." It was customized to distinguish it from other bloggers using the same, by changing the entire color scheme, and by strategic placement of images. The result is a page that is reasonably attractive "above the fold" on most monitors. Upon opening, the user will see the title box, the news ticker, the top of the latest post, the green profile box, and the top of the "Raison D'Etre" box.

The "news ticker" near the top was introduced over a year ago. Some blogs get off on little more than linking other people's stories, and getting credit across the Catholic blogosphere for being innovative. Trust me, that's about as innovative as using cream instead of milk in your coffee. We've got better things to do here at mwbh, like... oh, good writing maybe, on critical issues of interest to our readers. (Okay, okay, critical issues of interest to me!) Nevertheless, the news ticker is there, for those of us, er, I mean you who are into that sort of thing.

With all that in mind, we've been looking at some possible changes...

To begin with, the archives ("My Back Pages") do not have a "toggle" feature, which was introduced to the template since we adopted it. This causes the links for each month to be visible upon viewing, dating back to June 2002. That's a lot of unnecessary scrolling. But recently, Blogger has introduced the option for upgrading this template to include this feature. It may require redoing the customization, and so the code from the site as it is now has been preserved. There is also the possibility of further customizing the title box, so that an image appears with the title. While the title itself would stay the same, the image could conceivably change with the seasons of the year.

In other developments, we are looking at the possibility of a regular video-cast, hopefully before the end of next year. It would appear bi-weekly at first, and weekly thereafter. The technology is there, and we have that at our disposal right now. Obviously there would have to be something worth a look-see. The subject matter would have to be consistent with the stated philosophy of mwbh (see "Raison D'Etre"). It will also eventually have to be self-supporting, so we may introduce a PayPal account, and go begging for funds like the celebrity bloggers. (Mark Shea has a lock on the "Pledge Week" thing, so we may avoid that here. That guy's got a family to think about.)

With all this in mind, why doesn't the site undergo a complete makeover? Well, many sites in the Catholic blogosphere view "good design" as the ability to overload the page with fancy images, ornate typography for its name, and other cheap gimmicks. The results are generally just that -- cheap. That such dabbling of dilettantes tends to get awards for "Best Design" only encourages them. No, my friends, I've been a graphic designer for over thirty years, and I'm here to tell you, that's all a crock. Good design is something that doesn't look designed, that gets the readers attention through critical juxtaposition of color, imagery and placement. It also keeps the reader's attention through maximum readability, and minimum effort in searching for critical information. (In other words, don't make the reader have to work for it.) The status quo of "Saint's Blog's" hasn't picked up on this yet, but as audiences get more design-conscious, they'll have to.

Soooo... we're preparing for the next level. Look for a few more changes by the middle of 2009.
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