The dark colours got old very quickly, so I’ve compromised between the old and the new. I’m not completely satisfied with the way the comments and trackback listing pages look, but I’ll work on it.

I also need to create a sideblog, to keep the linkdumps (posts where I’m just noting something I’ve found and not adding much original content to speak of) separate from the main blog entries, to give the main section a bit more integrity I guess. This is not as easy as it seems, though. There are three options as I see it:

1. create a separate weblog which will then be displayed in a container on the main page of this one (an inelegant and inconvenient solution – for one thing, updates to the sideblog won’t count as updates to the main site)
2. use the MT Exclude Categories plugin to exclude the sideblog posts from the main page, and then include them in a sidebar container (I tried this, but for some reason I ended up with every single post not in the sideblog category displayed in the main section, even though by default my main page displays the last 7 days of posts – I may have done something wrong, so I’ll have another go).
3. Use Liza’s solution, which is to explicitly include all categories other than the sideblog category in the main blogpost section – again, not a perfect solution because it means editing that tag every time a category is added or renamed, and it also means I can’t give the sideblog “postlettes” additional categories for future reference. Despite that, it may be the easiest solution in the end.

Any suggestions?? I’m feeling the limits of my technical creativity here.

[update:] I made the Exclude Categories plugin work – Yay. I just had to specify days=”7″ rather than lastn=”10″. It works perfectly, so I don’t think it’s such a miserable hack after all. And I have just worked out how to format it so that it doesn’t dominate the page. Feelin’ good.