I personally don't like the gradient for the type of site that you are trying to make. It would be fine for a personal site, but since you have a mix of article writing, a personal page and top site, I say pick a different color scheme
While gradients are wonderful when used in certain parts of a website, try not to use them across the whole site Adding to what the others have said, the blue (purple?) font color isn't really working on that red/black. Maybe try a white, and a different font could probably look better (try somethings Sans Serif)
You are going to run into flexibility problems because it looks like your background gradients are fixed sizes. but the content is going to make the actual size of the areas vary, which might make your background images no longer works. What you can do to help with this, is to color the background of your area with the same exact color as the lightest part of your gradient. Then, specifiy your background image to not repeat on the y axis. This way, it will just continue on as solid if your area becomes taller than your background image so it won't look that bad. Yes, and fonts definitely need to be white. Hope this helps.
lol thanks all for your input. It is rather hard on the eyes and colors are off. Back to the drawing board lol! Thanks again