Time for a new look, eh? The old one was starting to feel dingy and claustrophobic. It still needs a few tweaks, so I hope you’ll bear with me for a day or two until the dust settles.

In honor of the new theme I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane, for those of you who have been reading this since the beginning (hi, Mom). And if you haven’t, maybe you’d like to see the old designs anyway.

Bookworm 1.0

I started blogging in December 2004 at Blogger, using the canned template called Scribe — the one that looks like old parchment. But of course I could never be satisfied with someone else’s design and I think it was around April or May of 2005 that I made my first custom skin. I kept the basic layout of Scribe intact because CSS positioning was way beyond me at the time, but I was able to tweak some canned clip art into a cute header. If you were around back then, you may recall the discussion about what color her socks should be. You know, except for the corner elements, I still like this one a lot.

Bookworm 2.0

Then I discovered stock.xchng. Wow, free stock photography! In one fell swoop I went from warm and casual to cool and formal:

Bookworm 3.0

I kept Bookworm 2 for quite a while. Then one day I was mucking around in the template, I forget why, and somehow I accidentally deleted it. I recreated it as best I could, but was never completely satisfied with Bookworm 2.1. Plus, I wanted to go back to warm and casual, which is more my style anyway. So I created Bookworm 3 with an Edward Gorey-ish font in shades of pistachio ice cream.

Come to think of it, that blogskin is still “live”; you can see it here.

Bookworm 4.0

Then I switched over to Wordpress. If I recall correctly, my first theme here was Bookworm 3.1 — Edward Gorey in pistachio ice cream — rebuilt on top of the WP default theme.

Bookworm 4 came soon after. It was a pretty radical departure for me. One thing that has always bugged me about so many blogs (including my own) is great big long sidebars. They contain too much information and it’s just plain distracting. And blogs with two sidebars? Oh, don’t even get me started. So, for Bookworm 4 my goal was to have no sidebar at all. Just the posts, in a liquid layout with plenty of white space around it. And I stuck all the sidebar stuff down at the bottom. The header looked roughly like this:

Bookworm 5.0

I really liked the Bookworm 4 layout, but no one else did. Maybe it was too weird. I dunno. In any case, it didn’t last very long. I bowed under pressure and went back to a typical fixed-width layout with the Burne-Jones painting.

Bookworm 6.0

Now I’ve come back to casual clip art again. This one was canned too, but I brightened up the colors and made her hair look more like mine. Here’s the original. (Come to think of it, it’s a pretty fair representation of what my hair would look like if it were long and there was even the tiniest amount of moisture in the air. Which is why I wear it short.)

What pleases me most about Bookworm 6 is that — remember what I said about sidebars? Well this time I put all that stuff on separate pages. So now I have a lean, clean, non-distracting sidebar, and you have easy access to links and archives if you’re interested.