Playing in the Sandbox

I've definitely been making the most of the 3 cents per day I shelled out for custom CSS on this thing. I spent the evening playing around with various themes and tweaking them, still dissatisfied because so many different themes had different pieces of what I like best in a blog layout, yet none would allow me to fully tweak everything to my liking.

Then I discovered the "Sandbox" theme, which is exactly as the name implies-- a no-frills sandbox that gives you free reign to add all the customization you want from the ground up, rather than having to tweak existing CSS. Of course, that means more work for me, as now I have to discover everything from scratch, but hey-- such full flexibility is really the only way I'm going to be able to cram most of my desired features into a theme, so why not? :-) It's also been a good way to learn about CSS :-)

I like the general 2-column layouts, but many of them have widths that are too narrow-- a long post would spill over too many lines and make it harder to read. Adjusting the widths of most of the prettier themes meant destroying the seamlesslness of the blog body with the header. Another look I like is the "boxy" look, in which each individual post is encapsulated within its own "box", so it's easy to tell it apart from the other posts. That is why I particularly like the "Rounded" theme I started out with. I would've stuck with it, too (rounded corners are nicer than square corners) except for the fact that the line breaks were too close together, making several long paragraphs look like one giant blob. Defeats the purpose of line breaks :-P

This current them isn't ideal, but I was able to play with the width of it without making the header *too* wonky. And I figured, since I'm still trying to post everyday and folks *do* visit this site to comment, a finished theme would look nicer than my current work-in-progress. So if you ever stop by here and see a very wonky layout, you'll know that I'm currently online and continuing my quest to perfect my theme :-)

In the meantime, I'm open to suggestions. My Blogger blog had a distinct coffee theme, which was fun, but I'd like to try something different now. Any ideas for color schemes? Backgrounds? Fonts? (the only non-negotiable font is the post font itself-- I like my 10-pt Arial, and it is always the first thing I change when customizing a theme! :-))