When I designed this blog, rounded corners were a Netscape proposal. If you used Netscape (or later on Firefox) you could round corners, but no one else supported the proposal. It was round here and square there. In those days people proudly announced at the top of their websites Maximized for Firefox. Of course, you don’t publish books to be read only by left-handers. You publish for the largest possible group. So, that was a kind of idiocy akin to preferring Coke to Pepsi, even though without the label Pepsi wins the taste test about 90% of the time.

There were articles written about how warm and friendly rounded corners were, compared to right-angled corners. One of the big companies added instruction boxes with rounded corners and everyone jumped aboard to say how absolutely wonderful it was. It was roomy and friendly. But the rounded corners were done with graphics. You could make one square graphic with a rounded corner and then rotate it 90º, 90º, 90º, and have four graphics, one for each corner. Then it was just a matter of directing each graphic to the right corner. Using four graphics, the box could expand or contract and still have warm, friendly corners.

Of course, it was more complicated than that.

I didn’t want boxes that got big and small, just blog boxes that got long and short. So, I designed one graphic for the top and one for the bottom of each post, for the title and for the archive, and things were enormously simplified. And so it sat for many years.

Sunday I did what I almost never do. It’s been years, really. I gave out the address of my blog to someone on my daily walk. When I got home, just in case, I checked to make sure everything was working. And it wasn’t. It was a mess. All the top graphics were missing. They were listed as no longer available. I was in shock.

The code, written years ago, though neat and orderly, was Greek to me. It took a full day for it to turn back into English. In the Army I could forget how to type on a three day leave. I’d sit down at the typewriter Monday morning and relearn the keys. That sounds silly, but there are some things you really must remember and other things you just can’t wait to forget. If it weren’t for computers, I wouldn’t know how to type today. I Googled “rounded corners” and found the following.

border-radius: 25px;

A little snippet that is now supported by everyone. So I threw away all the graphics and added one line to the CSS, et voilà. Of course, it took a few more hours to correct all the spacing and pull everything back together.

If you read this on a smart phone, you won’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. The plan for small screens is to pull the text and add a thumbnail for the photo. It works well enough, but it leaves the artistry behind. The date was one thing I was really proud of. It was a stroke of such genius that no one, and I mean absolutely no one, noticed. It was one of the first JavaScripts I wrote. It took the date from Blogger, deconstructed it, reversed the order, added periods and double digits, and then called up the graphics for the numbers and periods in reverse order, top to bottom, so it rested sideways on the page. So simple, and yet so complicated. I think I like it as much today as I did then.

I’m also happy with the brown and with the logo, and the archive that came in many shapes until I settled on this one. It was fun to design. But enough. It’s no longer broken. It’s better proportioned, still rounded and happier than ever. Enjoy.