freeform goodness

Looks pretty good, but the left pane is a little too wide; it overlaps the center pane a bit, unless I set my fonts really tiny. You might see what happens if you add an HTML DOCTYPE to the top of the file; it'll throw the browsers into standards-compliance mode...

Thanks for the suggestion! Now serving it as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. That actually helped in MSIE Mac/Classic (where things were a little wonky...) you're using IE6, right? Does that help the display on your system?

Ah, the joy of tabbed browsing... I just lost the more detailed comment I had typed here before. So in short (i.e. more harshly than it's meant to be for sake of less typing). looks a bit cluttered to me - possibly too many lines and too little padding. in some places too much vertical space making it hard to tell where things still belong together and where they don't. in right column mix of centred and right-aligned text. I find the font a little too small to be read comfortably, given that it is a serif font and only medium contrast.. the italic Cochin is pretty but right now it looks a bit out of place on the page as it only occurs only rarely and is quite swishy (swooshy? whatever...) amid a very rigid layout. Things I'd do:. up the font size to something like 15 or 14 px and slightly increase the line spacing for main paragraphs.. slightly increase left and right padding for main paragraphs. Use more italics, say for the dates or the authors (or even the banner title), not too much, just a little more. why exactly are there ... between the 'recent post' entries?. leave out a couple of the dashed lines. Possibly all the outer ones or just the outer ones of the banner title .Another thing that occurred to me: The page feels quite 'centred' to me as there are centred bits at the left and right. While I usually don't like centred stuff, I think it may just work to use centring on your page. What does it look like when using text-align:center; on the banner title, the dates, the post's titles and the author/date/category? I think it may look neat. And to try something risqu�, why not make the posts text-align:justify;? Browsers' bad algorithms for handling that may spoil the fun of that, though. Now go figure which of these are good ideas and which are bad or just my strange taste.

I only pushed the 'post' button once - honest!

re: the double posts: I'm running a fairly bleeding edge build of Blosxom and there's some sort of oddness happening with the writebacks plugin... one more "to-do"...
As for the other suggestions... I'm working on it. The current layout is really "new" to me, and I'm still feeling my way around in it. The old one, as crufty as it was, was so familiar to me that I knew it like the back of my hand and was able to tweak it within an inch of its life.
Thanks for the feedback!

SSP -- I can see the longer version of your feedback, but for some reason it's not all displaying... I'd troubleshoot more, but my girlfriend is making "computer widow" noises and growling, so I'll leave further troubleshooting for tomorrow...

nb: Writeback eats everything after the first linefeed... hmm.

Yoooo FREEKE!
First, it's cool to see you evolve everything, this latest change is munga and caught me off guard! the new 'boxed' header is classy and sweet!
However!
I mostly read ffg from home on my 12'' iBook LCD and so my first impression was ZOINKS that's hard to read. The fonts serify thinness really bead up the letters too much for my eyes. Combined with the profound contrast of light text on a dark background, it's an astigmatism tweaker, bigtime. The bright side of this is that it helps to give a "big picture" view of the page layout and design choices which works well.
Some favorite spots:
The FREEKE spot - mug/badges/iTunes/
I'm feeling the shout out but think it needs it's an alternate placement, maybe at the footer for the die hard top to bottom page checkaz inspired to slap you some bit fivers.

Same kind of idea on the WOD, like the idea, don't like the placement. Perhaps couple it with the ever LOVELY weatherpixie!!! Wheeee she's magically CUTE! Maybe shoot to offset her with the badges on the other side? Balance!
Last and most important, the content kicks ASS! (of course :)
-tp

OK, there's a Javascript style-switcher now... the "readable" style is, at the moment, butt-ugly, I know -- I'll work on it. This was moreso a proof of concept to see if I could make it work.