Fiddling

Opinions needed - see the end of this post.

Not as much progress as I'd hoped this weekend. We had houseguests (my mom on Saturday, his dad on Sunday) and DH and I went out on a date Saturday night. We saw The Bourne Ultimatum - mucho fun.

Also, I don't have any scenes that have "come to a boil" yet, so the writing was slow. I've mentioned before how I put scenes on a back burner and let them "simmer" until they're ready to write. To further that analogy, at any given time I usually have several scenes I imagine as pots of water on a stove. Usually, at least one of them has come to a boil by the time I sit down to write. But I've been pulling all the boiling pots off to write them lately, and by this weekend none of the new pots had come up yet. I can see little threads of steam wafting off them, and some even have bubbles around the edges. But I'm waiting for that first bubble to break the surface. What Diana would call a "kernel" - the descriptive sentence or line of dialog that is my foot into the door of the scene.

While I was waiting (a watched pot never boils, after all) I got to fiddling with customizing Blogger layouts. I only know a smattering of HTML, and no CSS at all. But one thing I pride myself on is being able to learn quickly, and there are a plethora of DIY sites explaining how to add sidebars, put images behind, etc.

So, I need you guys' (or "y'all's" for Deniz *g*) honest opinion on this:

Jenny's Test Blogger Layout

Does that look okay/work on your browser? Text easily readable? The picture's not too distracting, is it? (By the way, that's Kilchurn.) Keep in mind the sidebars will be fleshed out with all sorts of widgets like I have right now - LibraryThing, link lists, wordcount, visitor maps - and other fun content I add as I go along.

Or should I stick to the clean and simple approach with text-on-solid? I want to have some feel of Scotland on the blog.

Also, anyone know how to properly attribute the background image when I got it off Flickr and can't find the photographer's real name or contact info? Right now I've just linked to the photo page on Flickr in the footer. The image is copyrighted - "some rights reserved" - but as long as I attribute it (trying to) and don't alter the image (I haven't) I'm allowed to use it.