Tinderbox Templates
J. Nathan Matias has redesigned his weblog. Dylan Kinnet writes that it still has a distinctively Tinderbox look to it.
That's odd. Yes, a tool can influence the look of a weblog, but I can't really see why Tinderbox would foster one look or discourage another. The Tinderbox template mechanism is so flexible, for example, that it should readily accommodate just about any template design you'd want to throw at it.
Matias's scheme does adopt the unusually-detailed main-page sidebar I use here. I sometimes find that weblogs are so fixated on today that they forget to orient the new or infrequent visitor, the reader who is joining the story already in progress, and so I think a really detailed sidebar makes lots of sense. But I've been using it for years, and it hasn't really caught on.
I think most Tinderbox weblogs are closer to Derek Powazek's template examples. Jon Buscall's Grey Notebook, say, or Adam Feuer, or DonutAge.
Perhaps we need a little Tinderbox to the css zen garden?