I liked the general style of thisthe previous design (assume past tense from here - Ed: 24 Feb 06) - it's clean and curvy, and a big step forward from what went before. I'm not entirely convinced about the layout though. It doesn't quite fit on my laptop screen (maybe because you've forgotten how the box model works - Ed), and it doesn't quite feel solid and rational enough.

So I'm rebuilding the layout from scratch, and I'm using a very smart development technique for when you're using a fixed vertical grid - Khoi Vinh’s idea of using an image of the grid as a background image while you're developing.

So now I'm most of the way there with the updated layout - I still wanted to use Golden Sections as the basis, so it's an irregular grid that's more like a log-log scale. I've not yet applied the presentation styling, but have a look and see how it's going.

Somewhat lost in recent events over Smoking Bans, ID Cards and Glorifying Terrorism, a couple of wee announcements that didn't hit the front pages: apparently we're abolishing Parliament and cancelling elections.

Nothing to worry about then...

Well knock me down with a feather, Parliament has actually passed something that:

1. I agree with
2. Most of the rest of the country agrees with

What!? I hear you exclaim. Yes, it's true. In the midst of ignoring the country at large and taking away a large number of freedoms (not least, the freedom to leave the country without paying several hundred quid to deposit vast amounts of your information onto a honeypot for identity fraudsters), Parliament has agreed to bring Englandshire into line with the rest of these islands (and increasing areas of Europe) and ban smoking in public places.

Drawing on examples from a few sites I know quite well (Spread Firefox, Linkedin), and quite a lot more I don't, here's an analysis of the design patterns used by the best of current web designs:

• Simple layout
• 3D effects, used sparingly
• Soft, neutral background colours
• Strong colour, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of whitespace
• Nice big text

See the examples, and a fuller explanation of each of the patterns at
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/current-style.cfm

Garrett spotted and spooled this fantastic CSS layout generator app. Not only is the code extremely high quality, it's amazingly well commented, detailing all the browser hacks it's using.

I'm putting money on me using it to build the replacement templates for this site...

http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/pie-maker/pagemaker_form.php

Dave Fitch spotted this great postcard which is as close to my so-called career as anything I've seen before.

I'd love to draw parallels with the old Guild levels of Apprentice, Journeyman and Master, but I feel I'm still Journeying.

The esteemed Mr Handelaar recently opined that Websites should join the list of Laws and Sausages as things you shouldn't see being made.

Can't argue with that, and I'm exposing the guts a bit here more than I'd like. But you'll have to live with that, eh?

So, the site is here. This theme's a bit pret a porter, and it'll develop once I've lived in it a bit, and when I get time to work on it. I've moved from the initial Bonsai theme to one of my own design. It's all fixed width, based on Golden Sections.

The old content's still over in Zope, and as it's not in a standard RDBMS, extracting it and porting it will be a bit of a manual labour. But I'll be bringing it back as and when I get time, and it'll be at the same old URLs thanks to Drupal's Path module.