Augoeides Theme Update

People have told me on more occasions than you might think that I can be a bit of a fuddy-duddy about technology for a professional software developer. The way I see it, you don't fix things that aren't broken. Blogger has worked just fine for Augoeides for more than a decade, and it continues to serve its primary function. While I'm sure some folks come here and ask themselves if anybody who's still running a version of "Thisaway Rose" could possibly be serious, the only real issue I see is that the site doesn't look quite as modern as I might like.

The good thing is that I never got a site going on one of those hells of spinning skulls, animated lightning, and dripping blood bars, Geocities and Tripod. If I had, I might still be running it, and it would basically be guaranteed to look terrible. I would be used to it, though, so all I would have to say is "It doesn't quite look modern." Truly, that would be a sad, sad day, both for me and for those of you who would have to put up with the spinning skulls in order to read my articles. So in that sense, it's a good thing that I got into the blogging game as late as I did.

At any rate, Augoeides was running the out-of-the-box "Thisaway Rose" theme from 2006 to 2011. In March of that year, I hacked the template to be wider and to have two sidebars instead of one. In April 2011 I added Pages when Blogger finally implemented them. Wordpress had already supported them for a long time, so it was nice to finally be able to create some.

Then, in July 2012, I went through the site and made it less pink. Now I did have a rationale for choosing the colors that I did - "Clear Pink Rose" is the King Scale color for Tiphareth, Beauty, the sephira of the Sun in Liber 777. And besides, I was sick of the black on black "scary" look popular back then with occult blogs and websites. I kept the pink for links and headers, and it is of course reflected in my banner image.

So as you can see, today I have gone ahead and updated the site template one more time to give it a slightly more modern look. First I widened the site to 1020px from 900px. When the blog went online it was at 760px, and when I added the second sidebar I expanded it to 900px. But as monitors have kept getting bigger, it had looked skinnier and skinnier, which is not ideal for reading longer articles. And besides, even at 1020 it will still display fine on a 1024 x 768 monitor - you know, for anyone still using those.

I also have entirely dispensed with the image that used to shade the sidebars light gray and provide the rose-colored border for the page. Now the content background is plain white and it just floats on the screen rather than being contained within a border, which matches more modern trends in website design. I'm still keeping the pink link text and headers to match the banner, at least for now.

Without that background image, I can finally move my page links up to the row below the banner without it looking silly. It didn't really work right with the shading behind it still suggesting three columns, which is why it wound up at the top of the left sidebar. What I'm planning on doing in the near future is putting together a second page gadget for "Featured Resources" that will point to new pages summarizing my various rituals, presentations, and so forth. It is getting to the point here that I could assemble an entire magical curriculum by organizing the material posted on this site, so that's my eventual goal.

Thanks again for sticking with me here on Augoeides, and I hope you all like these revisions to the look and feel.