Glad you noticed. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to commemorate the tragedy of September 11th, 2001, and the loss of life both on that day and subsequently in the Middle East as a direct result of the attack. A graphic seemed too subtle. A blog entry seemed like an awkward fit on a tech Q&A blog, and replacing the site with a one-page commemorative seemed a bit too over the top for me. So a black edge seemed like a good middle ground.

To accomplish that, I made a surprisingly simple tweak to the HTML template that's used to build the home page for the Ask Dave Taylor site. Most weblogs have template-based site design -- which is one of the great benefits of using a weblog tool as the foundation for a web site, of course -- so it's pretty straightforward.

In the "index.html" template I found the following lines:

and changed them thusly (additions and changes are in bold):

The results were a page that looked like this:

I think it was just the right balance between being consistent with the theme of this site and honoring the people who have died. I hope you agree.