For anyone fortunate enough to not be within close proximity to me yesterday afternoon, you may not know that I’ve made the longlist for the Best Designed Blog on the Irish Blog Awards. I thought this may be as good an excuse as any to talk about the redesign that went live yesterday morning before the announcement.

I’ve always compulsively redesigned goodonpaper, but the motive of continually learning something new has recently given way to my never-ending desire to tweak given that I seem to get sick of stylesheet configurations very quickly. So for the past month, I worked on a template with an aesthetic that I wouldn’t bore of just as quickly. Spending real time working on the design and functionality rather than taking a half hour to replace a few hex values here and there seems to have paid off - I’ve remained suitably pleased with the design the entire time, and I now support tagging, multiple styles for entries (see the reviews as an example), and bookmarks are now separate and sit on the sidebar. Content is now the obvious priority, and having a design I’m happy with should mentally free me up to start blogging a little more often now.

Thanks to Roger for help with some of the more complicated code and to Sarah and Dave for critiquing - if I win big at the awards, I’ll be sure to split the million-euro cash prize four ways …