Some ongoing notes on this site itself.

Theme 

Woo-hoo! As of the Fourth of July, a new site theme.

Theming is a key experience for the Drupal developer. It's one of the fundamentals.

And I hate it.  

I'm just lousy at all aspects of site graphics, from image creation to CSS. Existing Drupal themes never fulfill me, and my attempts to hack them just add to human suffering.

That said, this green theme is the first time that I've said to myself, hey, not bad. A sad shake of the head for graphic designers, I know, but it's the best I've ever done. (Maybe it's my lack of goatee that holds me back. I don't know.)

Notes for the curious:

Base

This is based on the Zen theme, said by many to be an ideal theme for newbies to hack away at. And there's truth in that – I certainly found it easier to modify than Garland – though its CSS does contain bits whose purpose mystifies me.

Graphics

I made all my graphics in – suprise! – Apple Pages. Laugh not, it's a nifty tool for people with Photoshopophobia and Illustrator Aversion Syndrome. (Adobe tools, I'll master you someday! Grrr!) It's very limited in what it can do compared to the usual designer apps, though, so I plan to outgrow its graphic abilities. And I still have to take my Pages-designed bits into Graphic Converter or similar apps, to trim and scale and save them as JPEGs etc.

Some of the little icons here and there are from the Zen theme, not my creations. I just changed the color for many. My method: the spiffy Image Tricks app, using Hue Adjust to go from Zen's blue shades to green. 

Next

Perhaps I can release some version of this as a user-contributed theme, after hacking more to my liking and cleaning up the CSS. It's a huge mess of comments now, as I leave notes for myself on what some CSS function seems to do on the site, what the original values were before I screwed with them, etc.

Not too much point, though; it's still essentially the Zen theme with new graphics and colors. That's all.