The layout grid I used for Subtraction Six.5 was improvised and inconsistent — I hobbled it together without much consideration or foresight, more interested in getting something finished than building something that would continue to make sense as I got more and more serious about the writing I post here. Over time, by virtue of repeated use, I became increasingly and lamentably invested in its tremendous shortcomings. When you make fairly liberal use of illustrations in your posts, you essentially wed yourself to the particulars of the CSS you’ve established, creating graphics of a certain width or ordering content in a particular method. It works in the short term, but it presents problems when you sit down to redesign.

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It feels a little weird to sit down and write a post after a little over a month on hiatus, but here I am, doing it. I’ve finally got version 7.0 of this Web site in a state where it’s practically ready to launched. If everything goes correctly, I will stick to the announcement I made a few days ago and release 7.0 to the public on Mon 03 Jan, just in time for everyone to get back to surfing their favorite blogs after New Year’s day.

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Now Christmas is past, what's left to look forward to but a long and lonely winter? A new Subtraction.com, that's what! I'm getting very close to finishing this redesign. Right now I'm shooting to relaunch on Mon 03 Jan 2005. If I haven't lost you completely, please come back then!

I gotta head to California today to see to my mom, who is going to have a moderately serious operation. The doctors say it will be a straightforward affair, so I should be back in New York late next week. But until then, little to no progress on the redesign. Aren't you glad you tuned in?

Most of the look and feel is finished. Now I'm rebuilding the templates in Movable Type from scratch, both to correct amateur errors I made the first time around and to take advantage of some of the new features in MT 3.1x. Tonight, I made big progress when I got a rickety version of the home page publishing properly.