I now declare the 2004 blogging season open. Disregard this post — it’s my spring trainingThat’s baseball terminology, as Matthew will be proud to see me use.. I have not entirely been away from the web these past two weeks, I have checked in occasionally to dispense with blogspam and fire off the odd comment when I could not resist, and I did make good use of some of my Christmas holiday to redesign felixsalmon.com, penned by that renowned metrosexualist Felix, domiciled in the Lower East Side, and his Antarctic sister, the pre-Nobel atmospheric scientist RhianHence pink for Felix, blue for Rhian. It’s a no-brainer if you know them.. My help was not entirely altruistic: Now I no longer have to wade through the overwrought NYT analyses, useless Las Vegas eatery reviews and dubious design tips from the clueless to get to the breathless highs of Antarctic living, journal style, in the best tradition of the earliest explorersKidding! But only because I know how competitive Felix is., because Felix’s and Rhian’s posts are now separate, if you like. The coolest page though, if you ask me, shows you where Rhian is.

Because you are not reading this, herewith an aside as to some technical trickery in felixsalmon.com’s new design. By the judicious use of stylesheets and Movable Type tags (specifically, using MT tags as components in style names) I was able to give the posts of different authors different looks. Then, the right-hand column uses the “overflow: hidden” style attribute for DIV tags to allow text to appear depending on the width of the browser, as first done on MemeFirst. This particular trick took a while to get right on the various browsers, and, by the way, if you use Windows exclusively, you have no idea how good a website can look. Standard Windows fonts suckIn my more strident moments I will concede that my web design philosophy is to make sites that look great on Macs and do not break on Windows, on the premise that people for whom design is important tend to use Macs in the first place.. All in all, the site is sure to irk the likes of design “guru” Joe Clark.

I spent Christmas at the family compound in Ireland. Next door, the Royal Dublin Society had a fair, on which was erected a tower whence were dropped, every 5 minutes, a bevy of prepubescent girls whose shrieks permeated Ballsbridge. These emanations of terror were oddly comforting; they put a constant smile on the face of our house guests — and I felt like I was on the set of Monsters Inc.

The way back to Sweden, pace Ryanair, wended its way through a day’s stopover in Glasgow, where the architecture had me flooredDreadful and unintentional pun.. Granted, my expectations were low, but I had no idea that Glasgow is an Art Nouveau destination on a par with Brussels or Barcelona, and all thanks to Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Then, on New Year’s day, I moved apartments. With that out of the way, let the blogging begin.