I won’t say that it’s done (because it’s not… there are still several things I need to turn on or otherwise set up), but the majority of work is completed. I did all of the work offline using MAMP on my laptop in coffee shops and hotel rooms, including redoing the header graphic (same original image, same concept, just tweaked differently). If you notice anything wonky, let me know, please: I’ve tested the new design in Safari, Camino, Firefox, and Opera, and it seems to function properly (you will, however, need JavaScript turned on in order to make use of the date archives on the sidebar), but I haven’t checked it in IE6 or 7 (mostly through a reluctance to boot into my Windows partition). In the process, I also upgraded WordPress to 2.1, which was a smooth process as usual.

The new design uses several plugins, though small: Smart Archives, Fancy Archives, Autometa, and Google Analytics. I’ll probably re-add Word Stats and some pagination and excerpt handling plugins in the near future as well.

So, yeah… hope you like the new design. If you want to use it for your site, let me know and I’ll zip it up along with some notes on which things you’ll need to specifically change for your own blog. Feedback would be appreciated!