The second of my new year's resolutions is to post to LiveJournal once a day. LiveJournal used to be a great outlet for me both emotionally and creatively. While at times perhaps I have become too engaged, in general LiveJournal has been healthy for me. As the graph below shows, I have lost touch with that and in 2008 I was particularly absent. As I attempt to move forward in other ways, I hope that my LiveJournal can again provide the mechanism for reflection and emotional release that I will need.

I finally finished my new layout. I'm actually thinking of submitting it. It is obviously borrow heavily from generator, but has quite a lot of changes and enhancements. It has all my tag clouds, the link category system, allows for semi-transparent .png layout element, and is fully customizable.

Semi-transparent .pngs are something I came up with a while ago for my myspace and wanted to bring over to LiveJournal. Doing that meant getting rid of the background colors and using images for every background. I'm very happy with the results.

It could still use a bit of optimization to reduce the number of time-outs (it's a complicated script, and LiveJournal limits how long code can). I'm not getting to many, and a quick refresh usually does the trick if it happens. I've seen system styles time out, so I'm not that worried — I just know I can do better.

Each lines in this table contains three copies of the exact same icon set on different background colours. If you have a browser that handles .png images correctly, the same icon will look different on each background colour. I though it would be cool if different people saw different icons depending on their layout, and these icons will achieve that effect. Feel free to take any of the six icons here if you like the concept.

WHITE	BLUE	BLACK