Some Blog Updates

I’m doing some blog updates tonight so appearances might be sketchy here and there. I’ve been working on a change of theme for the blog, something simple and not so pink (it’s been pink since October, time for a change!).

There’s also a wordpress upgrade due, some plugin upgrades and the eventual change of theme itself which will have some “live updates” over the next 2-3 hours or so while I tweak a few things.

Just a heads up!

Update: Monday 22:35

I’ve posted the first draft of the theme, to give me an idea of what needs tweaking. Of course, my internet connection in general is damn slow tonight so that doesn’t help much.

Any feedback, thoughts, comments, errors spotted etc. let me know! I’ve ditched a lot of the small chicklets, removed the pink colour, the background image, the flash-driven Jaiku updater and overall I’ve gone for something a little more straight forward, hopefully quicker loading and a little tidier. Plus, it’s widget-friendly in comparison to the previous theme.

The sidebar varies a bit depending where you are in the blog – the homepage displays a mini profile (which will be rewritten and updated at some stage this week), recent blog comments, a blog roll and some links; the single pages display one adsense block, latest posts blog-wide and some different widgets…

So far so good.

8 Comments

  1. Michael Flangan February 19, 2008 at 12:33 am

    The “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed ” yoke overlaps with the post time-stamp.

    No “# Comments” on the front page?

    Looks nice and clean anyway. Although.. if I had to choose.. I think I’d choose the old design :-/

  2. Ken McGuire February 19, 2008 at 9:30 am

    Few kinks to hit on yet alright. Had missed the WWSGD plugin. Also need to make some of the styles a little more IE friendly but it’ll get there.

    Cheers Michael

  3. Sean February 21, 2008 at 12:41 pm

    Really like it! Nice updates man, must actually redesign mine at some point!

  4. Ken McGuire February 21, 2008 at 12:55 pm

    I’ll get more time at the weekend to work out the kinks and concentrate on the mobile side. Initial impression shows the load is less on mobile browsers. Added compression and caching to the pages as well to assess their use across the blog.

  5. David February 26, 2008 at 12:45 pm

    Kind of miss the icons at the top to be honest – they had panache.

    Otherwise – looks good 🙂

  6. Ken McGuire February 26, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    Funny you mention that as I pulled the ads in the header with a view to possibly reinstating those icons… less of a load (sizewise) than the ads.

  7. John March 4, 2008 at 11:50 am

    Actually was just reading another post and It just brought one thing to mind. The main post entry column is a bit wide. Strictly speaking there should be about 12 words per line, ensuring that your eye can easily track back to the beginning of the next line.
    Your paragraph bottom margins are 17px while line-height is 15px, they really should be equal, it’s a small difference but it would improve the flow of your text and make it even easier to read.

    That’s all I got 🙂

  8. Ken McGuire March 4, 2008 at 11:52 am

    There’s a sharp eye… cheers for flagging that dude 🙂

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