The View from the Prairie Box is the new and improved weblog of my wonderful, talented, and beautiful wife. (Am I biased? Well...maybe.) With the new blog, I had two primary goals:
Give it a brand-new look. My wife had been stuck with the same design since 2003, so one could say a new look was long overdue.
I was aiming for a design that was part Art Nouveau, part vintage Americana, and part contemporary web, with a touch of the whimsical. A complicated mixture I suppose, especially for a non-designer like myself, but I wanted the design to represent the era of our Prairie Box home and also the sometimes-playful, sometimes-serious style of Rebecca's writing.
I owe inspiration to all manner of folk, including Dan Cederholm, David Hellsing, Cameron Moll, and Jason Morehead. Special credit must also be given to Chris Nelson for inspiration on the scrollwork corners.
Migrate it to the WordPress platform. Previously, it was on Movable Type (in fact, the older archives still remain on MT). While I never had a major complaints about MT, over the years I've become more impressed with WordPress. More importantly, I'm considerably more skilled with PHP than Perl, so any issues I may encounter should be easier to address.