I’m trying out a new template now. It’s Aeros 2.0 with my own background. To create the image, I took one of my shots of Tokyo, resized and chopped it 1680×1050 (sorry all you people with 1920px wide monitors! 
), and saved to a JPEG of 100kb.
Motivations for the blurring:
- Lots of sharp lines that aren’t part of the layout/content overpower the design and make it difficult to focus on what’s important. (Yes, my writing is important.)
- Not sure how successful the effect is, but I like the idea that the city is in the background, but the reader’s vision is focussed on the content in the foreground.
- Blurring reduces JPEG compression artefacts.
As a side-note, my good friend Stefan has started a new blog, Death By Recursion. The name sums up the focus of the site: death metal and coding/security. Though there’s some speed metal I enjoy (Sex Machineguns and Dragonforce, thanks to Guitar Hero of course), I’ve never been able to put up with the death growl before getting tired of it after one track, but the security articles are really worth reading, even if you only have a passing interest: Stef has kindly written everything very accessibly (which I’m assuming has a lot to do with his Google AdSense get-rich-quick scheme).
It’s accessible not because I’m trying to make it accessible but rather because I have a simple mind and that’s the only way I can understand these things myself
I’d be lucky if adsense gets me enough money to buy a pint of milk a month but everyone’s doing it so wth. You’re just jealous cause google falsely banned you!
I can understand why people get turned off metal but that is because only the bad stuff is popular. After listening to it for 15 years I am pretty sure I have found the best!