chapter 11: blueflower.org v8.0
(june 2003 to july 2004)

Creating version 8.0 was one of the more extensive projects ever undertaken in the redesign of this site, and on the whole I was pretty proud of it.

Version 8.0 went up on June 9, 2003, which was just in time for the newspaper article in the Post-Crescent. The article even included a screenshot of this version. Thank goodness the photo was taken after this version was up and not while the last version was still in use. This site was an entirely new design, and there were several aspects which I really liked.

Once again, blue was completely taken out of the design. I went back to the orange, gray, and white of version 5.0. The header at the top of the page was orange. To the the far-left was a black-and-white photo of me wearing sunglasses. Just to the right of that was the logo in all-black with the letters pressed together so they touched. The stem of the letter "F" from the logo extended down the page creating a border between the side column on the left and the main content to the right.

I made extensive use of Futura to tie headers in with the logo. All the headers on the side column were image files using Futura. Futura was also used for the years on the archive menu and for the dates of the blog entries. Hoping it would stem the tide of spam, I switched to an image of my email address rather than regular text, but it didn't make a difference.

At the top of the main section was a vertically scrolling marquee of the titles of the ten most recent entries. I made use of a script I got elsewhere and inserted MT coding to make the listing work. Dare I say, I was quite proud of this also? Yes, I dare.

The fact that I liked this design so much would explain why it stayed in use for over a year. It was in full use until I decided to quit blogging in July 2004. Even then, the design was still in use for the links menu (the only remaining part of blueflower.org after I quit blogging) until I decided to start blogging again in October 2004.

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