Alright, here it is. A few things to note about it, if you're interested in this kind of stuff:

• It's designed to look good at resolutions of 1024x768 and higher, and probably won't even be very legible below 800x600.


• It's designed to be highly modifiable. You won't be stuck with the winter wonderland picture forever. All that it takes to completely redo the site's look is to drop a few nicely textured graphics into a prepared photoshop project with all the necessary masks ready to go. The faint gray line background, dashed borders, and transparency effects are the only aesthetic aspects of the site that will always be there.


• I mentioned transparency; that brings us to browser support. I spend a third of my life trying to convince Microsoft products to do what they're designed for. I'm not going to do it here, too. So this site was designed for Firefox. You should go get it if you don't have it -- there's a button in the sidebar. I have taken a stab at supporting IE via an alternate stylesheet that gets dropped in when IE is detected. But IE doesn't support the PNG graphics format properly, so things will necessarily look worse. I'm curious to hear reports of how things look in other browsers like Safari -- I don't have a Mac, so I couldn't test for it. Sorry. I'll whip up alternate stylesheets for Safari, Opera, etc, if necessary. Just let me know if they don't work.


• Speaking of alternate stylesheets, this site is now a bitch to load. Like, 250+k for the homepage. Yikes. That's because of the nice winter background (originally shot by Catherine) and because of the huge image that lets the sidebar background flow smoothly from one box to another. IE doesn't handle it very well -- it chokes on all those images and tiled backgrounds, and scrolls a bit more shakily than would be ideal. But then you should be using Firefox anyway, right? Right. Hopefully the page size won't be too painful for users -- most readers are on broadband, I suspect, and even those who aren't will be able to read text prior to the background graphics downloading. And those graphics should stay cached by most sane browsers for a good long time, preventing repeat downloads. However, if you really can't take it, I have designed a "Lite" mode. Right now you can get to it by appending "?lite=1" to the URL -- like so: http://www.zunta.org/blog/?lite=1. I'll be adding an option in the sidebar soon that sticks your preference in a cookie so you don't have to bother with the querystring nonsense. For now, just put up with the load times and know that this feature is coming.

I think that's it. I've got a few more things planned, but I'll likely get distracted by another project before I get to them. For now, please let me know what you think -- especially if you think "this breaks my computer".

UPDATE: Some things I'm considering changing already: the font, the line spacing, and the opacity of the transparent white box in which this text is appearing (it needs to be less translucent, I think). Thoughts?