As you may have noticed, the blog has undergone some substantial organization changes recently to make it more aesthetically pleasing and easily navigable (remember those goals of mine?).
Fixes
-Navigation: The blog can now be navigated by the topic labels on top, with other
navigation options (search and archive by date) in the left column. Basic blog information is more easily accessible in the right column, with individual blog description and "about me," including links to pages with longer info (sources and group projects) so it's not too cluttered over there.
-Consistency: Developed a pronounced color scheme. Blue was chosen to match the nice math-based background image that I have been using, and I figured that since it's most people's favorite color, it may have a positive impact on the blog in general (hey, I'm no psychologist...). Changed the font scheme as well; Courier is a bit hard to read, especially in large amounts, so I am now using Molengo for the main text and Courier for all the extra little stuff. Some labels were added and deleted to better suit their new purpose, so most posts had to be relabeled too. HTML of posts was fixed and simplified to use same commands for all posts, getting rid of extra bits and repeats to more easily facilitate any future editing.
-Template Change: Changed the template so that the header has a background. It's hard to stick to a color scheme when you need text to appear on a light-blue-and-black background because no color, especially not blue, shows up well. I also added a subheader, since the smaller text is actually visible now on a plain blue background. I'd just like to note that I found it quite serendipitous how the corners of everything are curved. It was how the template came, but it subtly matches the whole "curved world" part of NEG.
-Less Scrolling: Made two columns on either side of the posts to make it more symmetrical and make stuff easily visible instead of having to do too much scrolling. Post text feed (amount of text from posts shown) limited with full posts readable with the "read more" links for the latter purpose. Number of posts shown on home page limited to three, same reason. Clutter under posts (time of post, poster, comments, etc.) stripped to the minimum (labels and sharing) to take up less space and simplify the layout.
Problems Overcome and Yet Undone
-Pages/Labels: I really liked the idea of organizing by pages along the top of the blog, but soon realized that pages are static, so you can't sort posts onto pages or anything. They are really meant to be basic information pages, which I did end up using them for, but were not what I wanted. A quick search of the Blogger help site told me that I could instead use my labels for this purpose instead, and I finally understood why my teachers had extolled the virtues of labels so. Thus was born my new navigation system. However, my new problems begin once you move off the home page. To get back to the home, you must scroll all the way down to the bottom. Unlike pages, you cannot have a label take you to the home page. I contemplated just making a label with all posts in it called "home," but I can not find a way to make my label "pages" have a three-post limit like the home page (something to fix in itself to prevent overly long label pages with the addition of more posts). A "home" label would have every post listed, making the page very long, something I find annoying in websites as it makes scrolling hard and is slightly overwhelming, which spelled the end for that. Another problem with the labels is that when you click one, it not only changes color but becomes superscript. This, while making it easily visible which label page you are on, plainly looks bad, but I can't find a way to change it. I would also prefer to be able to custom sort the labels instead of only by alphabetical or number of posts, but that's not a big deal.
-Time: While it sometimes took a while to find where to adjust some aspects of the blog (especially that post feed limit), it was actually the general standardizing of fonts and font sizes, adding jump breaks, and cleaning up of the posts' HTML that took the longest, though that was mostly busy work.
-Multimedia: I haven't decided if I want to show images on the home page yet. While the teachers want multimedia, too much or the wrong kind will ruin the cleanness of the page. I may just make a fancy header to use while incorporating more images into the posts.