Tidying up

I've made some changes to my sidebar.

In the Links, I have finally gotten rid of my old "Things We Lost in the Fire" Amazon wish list. It's been almost two years! I did, however, move the items from that list that I still want to have into other lists.

I've broken out "Reference and How-Tos" from "Nonfiction", and I've changed "In My Dreams" to "Electronics and Appliances". I've also added my "Games" list, which I'd created on Amazon awhile back but never gotten around to linking.

The wish lists are now grouped according to type, so my list over at Amazon.co.jp is with "Help Me Learn Japanese", "CDs" and "DVDs" are together, all the books--"Fiction", "Manga and Graphic Novels", "Nonfiction", "Cookbooks", and "Reference and How-Tos"--are in a group, and "Games" and "Electronics and Appliances" fall last.

I've also made some changes to Fun Stuff. My Twitter, Ficlets, Dandelife, YouTube, and MySpace profiles are all linked now. I've grouped these with other communities/sites I'm affiliated with. The next group of links are fun Flash videos, then Japan-related stuff, and finally various cool things, to which I've added NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Finally, down in Comics, I've removed Bruno, which is over, Venus Envy, which updates so slowly that I don't even care about the story anymore, and Help Desk, which used to be interesting but is now just "meh", and I don't have time to read "meh" comics. (I don't think the content has really changed...I think I'm just tired of that kind of humor.) I have added Achewood, which I could never get into before but for some reason am finding intriguing now, and Evil, Inc.

I'm more and more wanting to redesign my blog template. I know so much more about web design now than when I first put it together. I'd like to keep the main features--the checkered background, the colors, even the style of the boxes around all the content, if not the boxes themselves. But I think the site could flow a lot better, and I would like to lay out my sidebar in lists. I mentioned before thinking it'd be a good idea to have the search as part of the header, and I'd still like to do that. I'm also interested in creating an archive drop-down up there. Of course, ideally, my design would be achieved through CSS, with none of this table garbage.

We'll see what happens as my ideas congeal. Hopefully this won't go the way of my fabled shift to WordPress.

(Speaking of which, I probably won't make that shift. Blogger has had its issues, but it works for my purposes. I like the fact that I essentially have a backup of my entire blog--the static files here on my server, and the Blogger database of my posts and comments over on their server. Plus, WordPress gets hacked regularly, which means I would have to update my software all the time. Also, one of the main features I found attractive on WordPress is obsolete these days. That feature is dynamic pages, and the reason they're obsolete is that they use too much bandwidth. So, there you have it.)