Design choices

I decided to use blogspot for this blog, because it's a) not going to go out of business like these "free wordpress" sites might, and more importantly b) I don't want to worry about maintaining it.

This second point may prove itself to be barking up the wrong tree, as I spent at least an hour getting RSS feeds that I wanted to show up correctly. First I tried AJAX; and was quickly reminded that AJAX can't retrieve urls from outside the current domain (so lame).

Then I tried one of those free RSS -> javascript sites. I know these can slow down loading of your whole page -- and that is exactly what happened.

However, I figured out a way to hack it so that it won't do this. This blogger template uses "pure CSS" to do the layout, and, I noticed that the page stops rendering when it reaches the part of the page where the javascript tag to fetch the converted RSS is. So all I had to do was stick the javascript tag to the very end of the HTML code, and position it wherever I wanted using CSS. This worked perfectly.

I tinkered a bit with the layout. I moved the left sidebar to the right, and it took me a while to figure out how to float the title which had been in the sidebar code to over the main content body.