This entry is about the origin and design of this blog. All links will open in a new window. All in a day's work! - a colophon I learnt about blogs and blogging somewhere round the middle of February. I was searching for an article for my company's newsletter. I felt it was a wonderful idea. I liked the idea of publishing to the web in a jiffy. Searching around for blogging tools, I found that I could not get into LiveJournal without an invite, Movable Type seemed superb but required a website. So, I opted for Blogger. It was free and offered free hosting. This was my only rationale in choosing Blogger. When this blog was started in March, I never had an idea that it would be a wonderful and delightful experience. After playing with it for a couple of days, I thought it would be a wonderful idea if it could be used as a platform for various people to speak on common issues. I invited Kicha, Ram and Rini to join me. Our initial efforts were more like mails. Later on, we broadened our horizons to include all issues from personal angst to music. The initial design was simple and colourful. The template was designed by Andrew Hoshkiw. You can a sample here. Everyday brought a new fresh look and avenues for experimentation. I had tried out webcounters, subscription tools, commenting systems during the whole of March and a better part of April. April brought me a new road to explore, Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. Till now I had seen some wonderful websites and just wondered about how people were able to create such beautiful websites. And I work in a web design company. At work, I was used to more of a image based layouts where the design preceded content. It still does. People here were just experimenting with CSS. I then began having a good look at the designs that had attracted my attention. I noticed most of them using CSS. A Google search promptly led me to a wide range of resources on the matter. Thank God for Google. Then what, search led to information, information transferred itself to understanding and understanding became knowledge. By this time, we managed to pick up a few more people on the way like Rajesh, Ganesh, Sinduja, Kavitha, Valli and Vijay Babu. We had increased to ten. One more member (Sangeetha) is expected to join shortly at the time of writing. Late April saw the blog's design being changed. This time, the bright colours were now replaced by a sombre dark purple colour. I took the layout from wicked design. This template was based on a CSS Design. I modified this template to match the requirements of the blog. It also gave me a chance to test out the various CSS techniques I had learned. My God! What an experience that was, both interesting and strenuous. May brought the summer with its scorching sun. The blog was also getting heated up with lots of discussions and other things going on. There came a change in the blog design once more. I found a very good simple and elegant design at CSS Colouring Book. I have modified it to implement a lot of interesting concepts that I had learnt over the past couple of months. By the end of May, I learnt one thing, CSS. It is really a beautiful way of expressing design. The trouble is not all web browsers support it. There seems to be a clear divide on support. If Internet Explorer supports it, Netscape and Mozilla don't. If they do, IE won't. There seems to be no common ground at all. As I had explained earlier, I seem to be facing some very peculiar and unique faults. IE6 is supposed to support CSS. A few of the most common layouts like those designed by Eric Costello, Rob Chandanais , Eric Meyer, and Owen Briggs are not displayed correctly in my machine (WinMe/IE6). But they are displayed in all their glory at my office machine (Win98/IE5). Mozilla is supposed to display CSS correctly, but this blog's layout doesn't. I cannot comprehend. So, my quest for a good design continues just as this blog will. I would really have to thank my friends, a part of this blog, who had sat there, demure and uncomplaining when I played around with the blog. This concludes the first part of the colophon for this blog. I?ll add the remaining parts whenever I get the time.