May 16, 2004

Both my bike and I nearly fell apart by the time I returned from Cambridge late at night after the 60km roundtrip. My bike’s gears and breaks unexpectedly stopped working and this morning my legs weren’t feeling too good either. This gave me the perfect excuse to spend most of the day redesigning my blog.

I’ve been contemplating changes for a long time. Layout tables were making my life miserable, so I finally got rid of them in favour of a more efficient CSS design. Though the site is still not visually engaging (gray is dull), it is functional.

Modifying the design was the easy part. It was somewhat harder to alter the way blog entries are archived on the site (and to avoid creating broken links). By default, Movable Type uses cryptic numbers to name the individual archives, which results in endless broken links if the numbering system changes. It’s somewhat safer and more intuitive to use the entry titles as filenames instead, but to do so I had to change dozens of entries.

And after all that, everything seems to work well and I can feel my legs again, which makes me happy.