Twitter lets you change your user name, so I did. Instead of the very long and misspelled “urbaneexistance,” I am now @jamessocol.

Shorter, easier to remember, more meaningful.

If you were following me, Twitter says you still should be, no worries. This is one 2.0-mistake I can correct easily.

I’ll try to line up a guest post but I will be avoiding typing as much as possible for a little while.

This design is a hybrid, pulling elements from some of better-looking sites and blogs. The three-column layout was inspired by Felicia Day’s “Flog” and Problogger, the thin header comes from a post on Chris Brogan’s blog, the heading style is cribbed from The Guardian.

There are two things I learned here that I want to pass along.

Theft is not wrong. Just because a design element exists on another site does not mean you can’t use it. I don’t mean you should steal the entire layout, images and all, or steal code (unless it’s under a free license, then steal away). But if you like the way your favorite blog does headings, there’s no shame in modeling your headings the same way.

Unfinished is wrong. I regret leaving the blog unfinished for so long. I would have been better served by using the Kubrick theme until I was really ready to switch. If you’re starting a blog and want to get to writing right away, go ahead and use some free templates. It’s much better than starting a theme and leaving it unfinished.

A corollary to that is “while incremental changes are fine in testing, only big, complete changes are OK in production.” In other words, don’t edit your live site, except small tweaks and bug fixes. When you upload new templates they should be tested and ready to deploy.

That being said, there are a few small things that aren’t quite finished. I need to write a short paragraph about myself and decide if I want to add a Problogger-/Chris Brogan-style link to the feed right at the top.

Well, what do you think?

I’m starting with the default WordPress theme by Michael Heilemann. I’m not going to lie: I really dislike this particular theme.

The look, though bland, is fine. What bothers me is how disorganized and really horrid some of the code is, in particular the CSS. The text is realigned several times (center, no left, no center! Ah, you said center! But I meant left. Well… very well, we are Church of… Sorry, off to see Izzard in a few weeks). Everything is done in pixels, except randomly things are in ems or percents. Many things are changed from defaults only to be changed back later.

In general, the idea of cascading seems to have been missed.

I wonder, how much of this is one person (Mr. Heilemann) and how much is hacks by committee. There is a definite feeling of “too many chefs” here.

And yet, here I am, using it anyway. As I work through my changes I’m doing a bit of Spring Cleaning, aptly enough in Spring, but it slows down the process.

Mad props to Firebug, and its brilliant style inspector which shows you not only computed styles, but the whole CSS ancestry of any element.

I’ve decided to reorganize this site and another one, to separate the blog/webzine-type sections and the professional/portfolio-type sections.

The two will still be pretty closely related and linked, but I think it will make a little more sense, and allow some more interesting design choices on the blog side of things. I’m looking forward to doing something a little out of my comfort zone.

But, this isn’t going to happen too soon. I just started classes again, and I want to build a custom blog/CMS (and possibly release it).

At first I was going to use WordPress, but I want more overall control over the structure and organization. So after deciding exactly how I want to organize both the site itself and the underlying code, and then actually doing it, there will be not one, but two interesting sites to visit.

Should be fun.

I’ve heard rumors and whispers that, while serif fonts are easier to read on paper, sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screens. I don’t really know where this comes from or if it’s true. I find that I can read 6- or 8-point Times New Roman but I get fuzzy below 10-point Arial, so I decided to use serif fonts.

Lower-case letters are very stylish and "en vogue" at the moment, and I like the way my name looks, so I’ve decided to drop the case for now.