Refurb Wars - Happy Shiny People

You know how it works.  You see the place, you decide that you like it.  You put a deposit down and move in.  Once in you get your stuff and arrange it the way you think it works.  First chance you get you move everything around and freshen up the paint/paper/carpet as budget allows.

Well, it started last night and continued this evening.  The search for a more reflective blogger template. As the title of this blog suggests a degree of tardiness by design, I wanted a look that would go some way to reflecting the underlying sentiments.

I hit on the word 'URBAN'.  I say 'hit', 'ended up with' would be a more honest re-telling.

'Grunge' in a web design seems to  mean, 'brown with irregular cherry/burgundy'.  'Shabby', 'tardy' and 'tatty' do not exist as tags or labels or titles.  The angst-ridden artist, does not appear to be a template designer.  So I had another think.

'Dark' - chocolate-flavoured black lace.  Gothic lingerie, perhaps.

'Urban' - Slate grey. Cool city chic or jive funky.

'Urban dereliction' , 'Urban decay', 'Urban destruction' - Barry McGuire.  Seriously.  Great song, rubbish template.  (Free) Template writers seem to be either on commission or Prozac, or both.

So, 30 pages into the catalogue, I decided on what you see before you.  Best I could do to reflect reject status.  Not exactly what I wanted; I would have settled for the slate grey if it had conveyed dirty (not in a Christina Aguilera/ODB way) edges - not 'dark jazz cool'.

3 Column template.  Now I discover 2 into 3 doesn't quite go.  Sorry for the atrociously balanced page formatting.  Three columns don't seem to work for me.  Nor for that matter does the fucking Digg widget.  Four times I went to the site, set the parameters and took the code.  Embedded it and refreshed - still looks shite.  Change the box to not show diggs.  Embed code - diggs on display; hanging awkwardly.  Bunch of bollocks I say.

So, what have I learned?  Everyone wants to sell you something.   Promote me!  Digg me!  Buy my e-book!  Sell from your tweets!  Monetise your blog!  The templates all look like they're designed for someone to write something clever then sell something to someone else.

I 'm not looking for a higher purpose, but draw breath and stop trying to make a buck for a minute huh?

Welcome to the disappointment.