h, that's a little bit better (I'm referring, of course, to the progress of skinning this site).

It has been a little more than a week since I tossed the home brewed, half completed CodingMonk out the window and adopted SubText. Overall, I am pleased, finding and the blogging package's basic installation and configuration a breeze. Even the act of creating a simple skin is straightforward and bears a striking similarity to the practice of skinning other, alternative solutions.

SubText's most noticeable shortcoming currently lies in the sparseness of its documentation. Modifications to existing ASCX controls seem to make up the vast majority of control variations in commonly available skins, and while this approach can be very flexible, I found it a difficult path to follow for adding truly new functionality. In the end, I had to download the source code and step through the debugger to gain insight into what was going on behind the curtain. The Zone Menu (read "Category Menu") on the sidebar, for example, took much too long to piece together. Someone ought to document how to create new, fully featured controls for SubText (note to self).

So the title of this post implies the obvious: I'm only half finished skinning this site (if that), but progress is definitely being made.

When I'm finished, I'll capture some of the things I found particularly troubling to figure out and save them for posterity.