Tuesday 10 June 2008

A Makeover for Pandora

I've been blogging for 5 years, less a few weeks. So it was really time that I re-vamped the site a bit. The old look was good, and I've saved the template, but the new look is more me.

It was necessary too for another reason. I received an e-mail this morning which said, in part:
Dear Zoe

The following is a request for permission to archive your A.E.Brain blog site which we have wanted to do for several years....
...
The National Library of Australia aims to build a comprehensive collection of Australian publications to ensure that Australians have access to their documentary heritage now and in the future. The Library has traditionally collected items in print, but it is also committed to preserving electronic publications of lasting cultural value.

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, was set up by the Library in 1996 to enable the archiving and provision of long-term access to online Australian publications. Since then we have been identifying online publications and archiving those that we consider have national significance. Additional information about PANDORA can be found on the Library's server at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html.

We would like to include A.E.Brain blog site in the PANDORA Archive...

Previous remarks on Pandora here.

Gosh. "national significance"... "lasting cultural value"... I guess flattery really will get you everywhere.

One of the things they do require though is a re-vamp of my archives, to allow their web crawler to save the whole site. That entailed a re-design anyway. The Makeover is not complete, and I'll be restoring a bit more of the previous functionality as time goes by, but it's good enough to gather feedback from readers regarding fonts, colour schemes, and layout.

So... hope you like it!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At first I was thinking that the bgcolor should be a bit closer to white, but on reflection the problem is probably just contrast with title / subtitle. I'd suggest change color of "A.E. Brain" from blue, and subtitle from purple, to something more like burgundy.
Not that changing from blue to pink is in any way symbolic or anything.
Everything else seems to work, as far as 60 second examination can tell.