sadly, the puppy is gone.

and what's taken its place is the result of 2 night's worth of browsing, view source code-ing, frontpaging, refreshing, and tweaking. the most rudimentary of templates, but hopefully the first successful step towards a template of my own.

it all started with the tabulas overhaul, where my template got mutilated, but was eventually fixed at the end. it was then that i realized that i wanted, that i needed, a new template that would be much cleaner, nicer, and overall better than what i had before. since then i started searching for images or whatnot to use as a theme for the new template. found it, made it blue, and it's awaiting further editing before it's launched as well.

at the same time, i started to pay more attention to the templating system at tabulas, and overall html coding. i began to understand the construction of tables and the use of the style sheet (but i'm no master, no expert, even no adept by any means). tr and div and other tags suddenly started to make sense. experimentation on dreamweaver and frontpage also backed up my slow self-learning.

last night, armed with a new 17-inch monitor and the most basic of web design skills, i initiated the construction of my new template from the ground up. started from the proverbial scratch. well, not exactly, i copy-pasted the head contents, the entry html and the contents of my sidebar, but the point's there. tonight was about learning the value of the overflow command, of which i've been searching for a long time for. hundreds of width tweaks and page reloads also happened, since picky html just won't do exactly as i say so.

but after all the overdramatized pain and suffering, this is what i have to offer. clearly nothing award-winning, nothing fancy, nothing even finished yet, but something to be proud of and excited about. i hardly did anything myself, but what i did do i am glad to know i did by myself. and i just hope that with time comes progression and eventually, evolution. evolution of both the site and my knowledge.

watch out for the next update.