I'm an old design engineer at heart. One of the first things I learned is that when designing a product, you get to choose two of the following three things: cheap, fast, and good. When I am working on the look of this site, I always choose cheap and usually I choose fast. So, good takes a back seat until another day.

I happen to love the current template for the WGOM -- A nice left hand column for the regular posts, a horizontal column for our videos and for what I'll call minor posts: This day in history and SBG shorts, and a three column arrangement underneath for various features, including the cup of coffee, list of recent articles, recent comments, top commenters, pictures of my daughter, search window, etc. and so forth.

I like the template, but there have been some issues that have been bugging me. This weekend I spent a little time fixing some of these.

1. I made the text smaller on the top commenters. I tried to organize by registration, but that has some problems. I'd like to be able to give Rhu_Ru, Will, and New Guy credit for the comments they made with their other monikers, but until I get that figured out, it'll have to be like this. True, the numbers aren't in a pretty line like they were (I took the table out) but until I add smaller print for the table in that column (not this weekend), it'll have to stay as is. I blame BeenAroundAwhile Guy for his long name, which caused the whole table to get out of whack. Kubel!!!!

2. I fixed the recent comments so that each comment gets a line feed. It bugged me that that was lost when I went to this template and now I have it fixed. Now all I have to do is put formatting of text back in and life will be grand.

3. I fixed the Recent Articles column. There was some funky spacing, but that's gone and now we have the last three days of posts lined up. Check that out so you know what's been posted recently.

4. HERE'S THE BIGGIE. I added a link to the MUSIC archive in the "Links to Popular Features" and I've also made it easy for our VJs to add a link to the posts. If you go to the ARCHIVE, you can watch all of the previous videos without clicking through pages! Well, at least the last few -- I have to manually manipulate the videos to make this happen. But, going forward, they will all be there for you! I'm pretty excited about that.

5. I experimented with some things on the single post. I hate that the single post has two different colors and no column whatsoever. I want to fix the single post so that it has a column and looks better. That won't happen for a while, but some day (probably in the off season).

6. If only there were an artist in the Nation who could dream up a logo for this site. That would be cool.

7. I would love to fix the page navigation in the header. Would love a drop down on roll over. Would love to Sh--can the plain blue header. See #6.

8. I rearranged the columns to what I thought was a more usable arrangement. I'd pull the links portion if I could get a nice drop down header as in #7. Too many links is like having no links at all. It doesn't help direct people to any other content because it's too damned busy. I don't even use my links -- I have SAGE reader integrated into Firefox. That works a whole lot better. But, I also have a desire to point people to other good Twins blogs. If only I had a better way.

9. I fixed the login page so that it isn't shifted to the left anymore.

If you have any other suggestions, let me know. (I know, the link button doesn't work in the comments.)