New Blog design

I’ve still got it! How do you like the new design for this blog?
I hadn’t designed web sites since 1995 when I created what at that moment was the first site for a Steamship Agency in the U.S. The company was “Gulf and Atlantic Maritime Services, Inc.” and is now defunct. It has since merged with the giant A.P. Moller back in 2000. The domain name was “gnamaritime.com” and is a name that has been expired for a few years already.
I just did an experiment to see if I could find the old site at the WayBack Machine in the Archive.org site. Surprise, surprise! It was there. Here is how my site looked like in 1995: Gulf and Atlantic
Pitiful, eh? Compared to today’s designs and tools available to create sites, the darn thing looks more primitive than an undiscovered Amazonian tribe, but, believe me, it was not only cutting edge at the time but the very first site for a Shipping Agency in the U.S. plus one of the first ones in the world for shipping related services. At that time the Web was completely new and almost unexplored for business promotion. I just wish I hadn’t had so many other responsibilities at the time that took me away from web designing and programming. Who knows, you may had been reading the musings of a Yahoo like ticoon by now… Wishful thinking? Well…There are so many, self-made web-millionaire weirdoes out there that one more weirdo would fit right in. Water under the bridge…
Which brings me to today’s posting. I had originally “borrowed” a design for this blog from another one using Movable Type. That design was completely done with HTML Tables and contained the most obscure coding you can imagine. At the end of the day, I had changed so many things in there that the code was completely unrecognizable from the original “borrowed” design. If you believe me that it was obscure to begin with, the end result was right down akin to Egyptian hieroglyphs before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone…
Finally, I decided to “refresh” my web design knowledge. A few books, design oriented web site readings and Dreamweaver’s learning curves later, here is the result. Now the whole blog is based on CSS and XHTML. With the exception of the Calendar section, it contains no HTML Tables. It even passed the W3 compatibility check! See the links to the validation site to the left and check it out.
You can also check my Home Page. That is the portal to a new site I designed that will host an I Ching Forum, among other themes, in Spanish.
If you use Movable Type for your blog and like this design, you can download it from here. Just customize it to your needs.