Behold! A brand new layout! Only, it's not entirely brand new... Obviously my Okami layout with a few changes. The major change being that the entire site is fluid size now, meaning you can resize your window and the text will expand to fit! (Also with a minimum width, so not everything crunches up and implodes.)

I tested it on all major browsers: Internet Explorer 7 (if you have 6, upgrade now... There's no excuse not to), Firefox, Opera and Safari. (I guess that nasty, awful beta has a use after all.) As far as I can tell, they all work flawlessly and very much the same. Even my old Okami layout had some minor text discrepancies between browsers... Nothing especially evil, but they didn't look the same when you put more than one browser side-by-side.

This time, instead of writing it from scratch, I took the Kubrick layout bundled with WordPress 2.3.1 and changed everything while keeping the more modern approaches to things like the widget sidebar. And, speaking of which, I can now easily resize the sidebar's width to cater to whatever thing I want to put inside! I was experimenting with a last.fm display, that was formerly too large to fit, but it worked perfectly! Still waiting for a NaNoWriMo counter, though... Hopefully they still have them.

I decided to leave out the Twitter feed for the moment, since there seems to be massive lag when updating via AIM, which was the entire reason for getting it... I don't want to load another website just to snap-update by blog... If I wanted to load a website, I might as well load THIS. So until something gets worked out, it stays out... Believe me, I'm as disappointed as you. (But you're probably not disappointed, so nevermind!)

Okay, so I took the bait. I really only know one person with Twitter, and it turns out that they use it all the time, so that got me to thinking... "Well, maybe I could put it on my blog. That way, I could essentially IM it with things when I'm bored." So, I decided to give it a shot. It only shows up on the main index, and it doesn't seem to slow anything down (more than it already is, Mister TW-With-A-Weak-Server). It also uses Javascript, which I know some people have shut off, but, really, the only ones I know with it shut off are Linux-crazed nerds who willingly submit themselves to browsing the internet with browsers that don't do anything pretty, so I'm not going to cater to them anymore. They just won't see Javascript!

National Novel Writing Month starts Wednesday night! Yay! Cue the month of madness... It'll definitely be interesting this year. I've got college going on this time, and I need to start working at least a little bit again, and now I have to write 2000 words a day. Honestly, 2000 words a day is no sweat. I can write 300 word college forum posts in about 5 to 10 minutes if I know what I want to talk about. So about an hour for 2000 words if I take that formula. IF I know what to write about! So I've been taking plot notes so I can chug along without stopping to think what happens next.

I've had some difficulties with deciding what to write about... I've got like 5 different stories to pick from that are all in their beginning stages, except for my signature masterpiece-to-be fantasy story. You know, the one I dream of releasing in a set like Lord of the Rings or Chronicles of Narnia and making my millions! (Er... Or, at least, getting published to say I wrote a book.) I started getting some brainstorm ideas for that again, so I decided to do it again. Hopefully, it'll be second draft and more. My last one was very bulky and fat and read more like the Wheel of Time with all its useless fluff than it did anything else... Personally, I'm leaning a bit toward the short, concise stories like Narnia, and just release more than one... and instead of, say, three giant tomes like Lord of the Rings. (Or the horror of thickness and poor writing that is Harry Potter.)

This year, I've got three things going for me... One, my story is more mature and I know how to write a little better than last time. Two, the fleeting thoughts I sometimes get that my ideas are stupid are quickly swept away by remembering that JRR Tolkien repeatedly wanted to stop writing LotR for the same reasons and CS Lewis kept convincing him to finish it and hey! Look how that turned out! Three, thoughts that someone might not like my style of writing are quickly swept away by remembering how terrible JK Rowling writes and how many hundreds of thousands of people somehow think it's the greatest series in history. Face it... You might like the story, but the writing is atrocious, and the plot devices are painfully predictable. "Oh, they learned a spell to disarm opponents in the first chapter? Bet they use it against the dark forces." Stuff like that... Oh-ho-ho-ho, you won't find that in MY story.

Anyway, hopefully NaNoWriMo releases those little widgets that I can put here so you can watch what I've got done so far. I haven't seen any notifications of that, yet, so I don't know. Although, hey! If you want to watch my profile directly, here's the link: http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/155172