Ethicurean redesign is a little half-baked

Whenever I attempt to have more than four people over for dinner at a time, I quickly get out of my depth. I don't plan what has to go in the oven when very well, and inevitably I'm racing around in a sweaty freak-out until just minutes before the guests arrive — and sometimes even after. It's not a pretty sight.

Well, this is a little bit like that.

It's almost 5 a.m. here in California and I've been up all night trying to wrangle this mess of a redesign into shape. It's functional, so I am leaving it up, but there are lots of things that need to be fixed. (For you nerds out there, I bought the Proximity magazine-style template (demo), and installed WordPress locally to test all my CSS and PHP modifications before they went live, but some wouldn't work until they were live so I decided to just go for it.)

My goal with this layout was to segregate the Digest mini-posts over in their own column (below left, using the category Digest) and to give more space and a longer "front page" ride to the original posts. That part at least appears to be working. However, the template is supposed to be displaying three featured posts up top here, which it obediently did on the test site but refuses to do so now. The column on the left is not pulling from the correct "child" categories, but appears to be choosing posts randomly to include. I also think the home page looks way too text-y and needs more white space, but every time I change the CSS to add padding, the page blows up.

I could go on, but this is the equivalent of apologizing to your dinner guests for how you forgot the parsley and burned the roue slightly. Oh wait, I do that at dinner parties too.

Anyway, pardon the mess, and I hope y'all can live with the site like this for a bit: I am going out of town tomorrow (oops, today) for a week, to L.A. and then Monterey, but I stubbornly wanted to get this done before I left because yesterday, May 9, was the Ethicurean's third birthday. A big, heartfelt thanks to all of you who've hung with us since the beginning, as well as to those folks who've just sat down at our table. We have a lot of ambitious plans for the site over the next few months: with luck we'll execute them a little more gracefully than this redesign.

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