thoughtcrumbs

Great article at A List Apart this week -- how to tame those gnarly lists with CSS, something I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks. Many elements, such as nav bars and breadcrumbs, should be marked up as lists, but rarely are, because of the bullets, vertical alignment, and pesky indentation issues traditionally associated with lists. Between ALA and the css-discuss list, I'm finding there are people devoted to investigating every CSS nuance, and doing so with a smile. Special props to list chaperone Eric A. Meyer who has made sure that newbies and veterans alike get their questions answered sufficiently.

Now that I've spent months properly marking up my future redesign of this site, I'm beginning to wonder if I should scrap it all and move to a database-driven model. I'm sick of retyping content (such as book lists and reviews) every time I redesign. But there's the old tradeoff between ease of maintenance and download speed of simple, static pages. Blogger has made it wickedly fast to post content to this site, and I've gone to the trouble to create separate blogs for books and music (buggy previews here and here). But now my content is trapped in that database, over which I have limited control. For example, I have no idea how I'd do a global search and replace for a URL in my two-year-old blog. Perhaps I need to investigate the Blogger API more thoroughly, or roll my own with MySQL and PHP. If you're a visiting web smartypants and have some suggestions for me, please do send them my way.