Hello 
I'm Siobhan Curran/Kisa Naumova, and this is my weblog. I tend to write about stuff like crossdressing, Macs, code, cats, wine and Second Life, but in general it's just an ongoing conversation about all sorts of stuff. If you'd like to know a little bit more about what this all is, I recommend starting on this page which has a little bit of info on who I am, and what I'm trying to do — or you could dive into my five years worth of archives if you like.
Otherwise, feel free to close this box and explore...
Ahem
First day of Spring, first day of a new weblog 
I have no idea what the reaction will be to this — whether it's an "OMG!" or a "Meh", but whatever, I've been playing with this design since mid-October — ever since I stuck this image on Flickr.
This is all very Beta BTW (how del.icio.usly Web 2.0 of me 
) — there's a stack of stuff I haven't got round to doing yet — the most obvious being the bare-bones comment form at the bottom of the page, for example.
But still, I wanted to share
The idea that's been going round my head for a while, is to try and build on the 'continuous' nature of what I do online. A long time ago, when I was first posting stuff daily, it never really occurred to me that this was a weblog — to me it was just a diary. As time went on, I started to pick up little bits and pieces that I'd seen elsewhere, to the point where it became a monstrous garbage of add-ons, hacked code, original code, and clunky CSS.
I wanted to simplify it, really — I wanted to convey the impression of a stream — of conscious, of photos, of activity, of wine.
And I guess that's what the image that I came up with when dicking around in Photoshop one day suggested to me — it said "Hey Siobhan, this is what your weblog looks like. Stuff comes in all normal, gets mangled, then squirted out at the other end."
So really, what I've been trying to do for the past six months is come up with a design that reflects that image.
...
There are some noticable things that are different from the old blog: the Blogroll is missing, as are the del.icio.us links and the Flickr images. What I want to do is have these pretty much just in the main content.
(Apart from the Blogroll — I'll stick the list on the 'About' page sometime soon — click on my logo. People Like Traffic™, I find. Although I will be hardcoding it properly into the main stream.)
I've also got three columns going on — the left one and the main one are pretty similar to what was before, except the 'previous' stuff now shows days in relation to the day being viewed — rather than the current day.
The right-hand column shows stuff two weeks ahead of the day being viewed. I really like the idea that if you stumble into this via Google or something, then you actually get plonked into the middle of it — and have to fight your way through to the present.
(The stream image at the top takes you to today, if you're lazy )
Here, I can't really explain it better than showing it. Here's a link to my favourite day — The Day I Met Eddie Izzard
I've got a lot of stuff to fix because of this (as you can tell from the formatting woes of that page I just linked to) — little bits of regex here and there to tidy up loose ends, tweaks and the like to the comments form (and scripts — I'm going to drop The Angels, because Jo's changed the way that it works, and I'm going to try and use the Flickr API rather than scraping a web page), I've got to implement the archives and search things all over again, and no doubt I'll be tinkering with the design for a good few weeks to come.
But on the whole, I'm rather chuffed with it There are some little touches that make it special (I think — like how the orientation of the comments change only if it's a new person).
And it's the first time *ever* I've been able to stick *this* image on a weblog of mine:
Anyway, I can't really do anything to it for a couple of days, because I'm away. So relax, stretch yourselves out. Feel the gloriousness of white-space legroom, and feel free to point out (a) how lame this is, (b) how many things are borked, and (c) how much better the old one was.
Oh, and the links..? Yeah, I did copy Tom — sorta.
Oh Wow !
Looks fantastic — the image at the top is so slurperific !
I come here for the text and stay for the design...
Peetr
Oooooh...nice
Love the flowing wine image.
Could use some sort of differentiation the comment entry boxes (doesn't show in Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Linux, or Mozilla 1.7.8)
Serena Mayfly
Ooh. Me likey. I miss the old comment thingamabob, though...this one's harder to read, I think. And I miss the old quotes around comments, but that tiny triangle pointing to one direction or the other makes up for it....I guess?
Looks really great. I have to admit that I was worried... I spend far too much time reading what you write here and I I was hoping you'd be able to keep the same "atmosphere" (too much wine and too late at night to be any more eloquent than that, sorry!)
Well, you've done it and actually made it better. Love it! 
Emily S
Cool.
I'll comment on comments no more until there is further need to comment (or not).
But first I'll go and lay down and try and work out if what I just said makes sense.
Serena Mayfly
Cheers guys — I must confess, there's something seriously wrong though — and I'm in no fit state to debug. Pants.
love the colours, love the wine header, very Siobhan.
Will it remember who I am though?
Wowsers.
I'm just commenting so I can see my floating head.
"7c523f734537a0406e80d050a36ea20fbf62720f5e7cfa9d43744a3faf341b0f"
And that is what, exactly?
o.o
Yep, there it is.
Tiffany, that is my code, falling apart at the seams. If I wasn't drunk, I'd try and fix it
That's the md5 hash of Becky's floating head... 
Fuck this — I'm going to bed
Ooh lovely — and it's a sad day when you hit the hay before us... I actually thought I might be the first to comment on the redesign...
It'd be even sweeter if Gravatars were actually working... then you could see MY Floating Head Of Doom™...
A sad day?
Nah, I just got school tomorrow
Don't we all...
Feh, me too. Music, psychology, and geology...here I come! I really ought to do my homework, though.
Woot, school. bangs head on desk
And wait....what's an md5 hash?
This looks fine on Safari so fuck the rest! Seriously though, I like the new comments "balloon" style (espeically how, like you said, it doesn't change orientation if you make another comment. Makes the whole thing look and flow like an actual live conversation. In an iChat kinda way...only better! And I LOVE the header graphic, as I said in my comment on it when you posted it on flickr.
Looks very nice Siobhan.
Quite apt that a blog totally powered by red wine should incorporate it into the design... (which is a fab image btw)
Love it , looks great specially the graphic at the top, does look like wine flowing
Looking lovely... especially like the new colour scheme. That's about as techy as I get I'm afraid
For some reason all the comment boxes disappear on Mozilla (well they do on mine anyway!!!). I've had to use the dreaded Internet Explorer to leave my comment...Yuk
Yeah, sorry about that, I've got a "border: none;" at the very top of the CSS, I just forgot to put in a border for the form elements. Fixed now
It's all "OMG!" on this end. Lookin' mighty fine.
Thanks Lindsay In fact, thanks guys for the comments above — I really wasn't sure how it would go down, having been all pink for so long. Give me a few days to iron out some bugs (and tidy the form) and things will settle down a bit.
(why is the formatting borked?!)
I love the layout. It is most definitely an OMG!.
OMG! It's good
meh. Now I'll have to redo mine.
(I'm having teething problems)
Four Times Around The World
Technically, I haven't actually driven my car 100,000 miles — when I got her she already had 5K on the clock. But when has a little thing like accuracy ever got in the way for me before?
On the subject of cars and stuff, this weekend I'll be doing by (delayed) CBT again. On the one hand, I'm really excited — I can't wait to do the whole process and end up with a nice big 600cc or 400cc sporty bike — but on the other, I'm actually, honestly, shit-scared.
The first time I was ever on a bike, I went backwards as soon as I let go of the clutch, and the last time I did the CBT, I didn't feel confident at all.
But I guess you've got to put yourself through these kind of things to get something you really want, don't you?
Riding a bike, it feels, is part of my idiom
Ignore me — I'm debugging...
Siobhan
*la la la*
Okay. My computer was going all borked on me last night. Glad to see you've defined the comment box though. As "less elegant" as it may seem.
I really like the look. The color is just close enough to the old one to tie things together and just far enough away to be new, fresh, and "Hey! Look! I'm Siobhan!". I also love the sideways wine thing graphic at the top. Maybe that's what wine looks like in space?
Ooh, yes, I like it. Strange that the comments aren't apearing on some versions of Mozilla though, because they're fine here on K-Meleon (which is a Mozilla browser).
How do you get a picture of yourself to appear next to the comments boxes? I don't want to look like a grey porcelain knick-knack-head.
Strange that the comments aren't apearing on some versions of Mozilla though, because they're fine here on K-Meleon
That'd be because I've changed the code since those comments were posted
How do you get a picture of yourself to appear next to the comments boxes?
Savvyness
I'm currently sitting here slightly concerned that I'm about to be outed by a student on the other side of the room.
He's an inquisitive soul — and is having fun by seeing who links to (a) our course website, (b) our University website, and (c) the Art Journal that we (as a school) publish.
Fortunately, he's not typed the search query properly, and so nothing comes up — but if he got it right, he'd have a page full of links to this place 
Equally fortunately, he's given up, and is now using various online tools to laugh at my sloppy coding on the site — but I'm sure he's going to find this sooner or later.
Blimey, you've gone and done it!
And 4.01 'Strict' — nice.
And the 'gloopy' thing! I'm glad you've put that to good use — loved it the minute I set eyes on it.
Speech-bubbly comments — cool (note to self: must get floating head).
Still undecided about all the 'whitespace' though. It's all nice and minimalist, but a tad glarey (if such a word exists) IMHO.
But here's the thing (and it almost always happens when a site gets re-designed): If you first arrive at the a after the new version has gone in, you find all kinds of stuff about how the new version is "so much better / nicer / sexier / cooler / faster / etc. than the old one" and, on back tracking, stuff about how "I'm gonna' do this and plan to try that and want to drop the other" and none of it means a thing because you can't compare the two designs. I'm sure if you go back in time you'll find references to elements that don't exist any more — it's confusing (trust me, I know; I started reading Siobhansplace, but some of the stuff about the design of the site was actually referring to tranniefesto — made me wonder what was going on).
So now if you'll just make it so you can re-size the text in Win.IE, and... OW! Stop throwing things — you could have some ones' eye out
Alli' Cat'
you can't compare the two designs.
I know, and initially I was tempted to use a cunning bit of header redirection to shunt you to the old site if you were looking at a day before today (I still might). I haven't deleted it, I just swapped two folders within Erin's Virtualhosts.
Dunno ... might think about it in a month or two when there's enough content for this model to make sense.
I've arrived late to the party, as usual. Stunning design, and the fact that really, on the page, it's not changed too muc, yet it looks so much more elegant. I'm glad you didn't go with bright white as a background. Whatever the shade is, it's awesome. Also I'm jealous as to how you've got your text looking so smooth. Damn you. (Also now can we get a Hi-res version of the wine shot, I've got a copy as a background of the original on Flickr and sadly it doesn't expand to 1680x1050.
Now I want to redesign my site. Thankfully for me, I can't, eh?
Dropped
That is the most borked PowerBook screen I've ever seen
Is that an LCD display?
Beautiful. Expensive, but still beautiful.
....did someone drop that in a volcano?????
Whatever the shade is, it's awesome
Um Dan, it's #FFFFFF
Um Dan, it's #FFFFFF
Really? It doesn't look like pure brilliant white to me, it looks more muted. less of a glarey-white.
...
Well. I've just opened up a flash window, and filled half the screen with #FFFFFF, and damn it. It is PBW. I'm drawing from this is that I'm going blind.
...
On further inspection, the reason it doesn't look like 6F is that the contrast was turned down on my display. I'm an enormous fool. I thangyou.
... Also, please don't tell me that's your broken PB. On the upside, to that — it looks like someone's going to be getting a replacement Macbook Pro.
Dropped
Ouch. LCD screens really do turn into a pile of crap when you bounce them. But on the 'up side', at least they don't explode!
FYI: All the box borders on your comment form have gone AWOL (WinIE 6.0)
Alli' Cat'
Thanks for the advice about gravatar.com, and for being so polite about not saying "It's under the bleedin' email box every time you post, you dozy git"
(It's not there yet because it's waiting for approval).
looby
My iBook's screen looks about that bad. Was a sad sad day, that was. As for the #FFFFFF, with the pink comment balloons, the background doesn't look #FFFFFF. I had to upon a blank page in textedit and drag it over the pink to block it out to see that the background is indeed #FFFFFF. My eyes are old and tired though. BTW, um, who's powerbook was that? Does it have vga out, and therefore kinda still useable?
Bastards
Yup, I think the new site's an improvement. I never really took to the pinky mauvey tones of the old site. As someone(s) else pointed out above there's a decidedly ichaty character to the floating heads but to me it does that conversational flow thing that you want. Site doesn't break in Camino btw. Love reading your stuff.
Tasha Macintosh
Ok, I've gone and messed up. The above post is not from Tasha Macintosh. It's from Penelope Layne and the problem seems to be that I thought I knew what you meant by my Angel ID number but clearly I was wrong. So I'll try again without being so clever this time and stick to stuff I know for sure. Fingers crossed.
And I have no idea of what I did that inspired the line of code above the post. Well, off to good start am I.
Penny
Penny Layne
It's my fault Penny — things aren't quite running smoothly yet...
That's not my PowerBoook BTW — it belongs to a student who bought it cheap off a mate because of the screen. He uses it with an external monitor
Love the new look; nice balance between continuity and change.
I've always had trouble with the colours, though. I've got some sort of worsening colourblindness that I realy ought to get diagnosed. Even so, before I got down to where you said the background was #ffffff, I, too, was convinced I could see PINK! Good trick
Ha! Erm, yes. Totally intentional /whistles
Well I, for one, am going to break the mould. That logo at the top of the page. I was convinced it was spilt nail varnish. Then I find out it's red wine. Good God woman, what are you thinking of? You didn't waste good wine just for a fancy header did you?
As to the rest of the site, well I hate it. It's clever, clean and a delight to behold. And here am I stuck with my standard blogger template!
I predict a lot of sites will be redesigned in the immediate future. Don't be surprised if they don't end up bearing a striking resemblance to something that is #FFFFFF with a hint of pink.
Not that it hasn't been said already, but WOW! I love the new design!
wrt the broken laptop screen... I had to read through the comments to realize that it was a laptop. Oi! Is that 7 years bad luck?
Now if only you could get it to remember who we are then it would be nigh on fantastic.
Am I the only person who thought the background was white??!!??
ps... I was expecting a nice little video of your milometer ticking over to 100000 
Cheers guys
Jane, I'm going to redo that from scratch — I had a crappy, bodgy cookie thing going on. I know what I'm doing a bit better now
Steph, I was doing 50mph — it was bad enough of me to be taking pictures, let alone shooting film
You're not away... You're sitting there watching us come by aren't you?
No, really — I like it. This borderless comment section is messing with me a bit, but it's a cool idea nonetheless. I still love the three-column layout. It gives everything a nice flow.