Well hopefully we are up and running at least=P
After a nearly four month hiatus, I think I finally got the website back into a state where it can be released back into the public blogosphere. It has been a long story behind this particular site. It all began with a redesign which broke when I tried to put it up. I tried for weeks to fix it and then eventually real life came in and smacked the web site to the side. I quickly forgot it in favor of the many things that occurred life and when I was able to return, I decided to scratch the redesign and instead simplify it down to the base.
This largely came because of the elegant new them Twenty Ten that WordPress launched with the release of 3.0. And I gotta say it is very nice. So instead of spending a few more weeks figuring out what exactly was wrong with the redesign, I decided to tweak Twenty Ten into a format that I actually wanted to have.
So what features did Twenty Ten bring that I was trying to add to the site?
For one, I wanted easier and better menus. In fact, the thing that broke on the redesign was the drop down menus under the banner. So it worked very well that one of the new features in 3.0 was the easy to manage drop down menus.
Also, while my intent was not to have full-fledged widgets at the bottom of the blog, I was wanting to put a listing of recent posts at the bottom of the blog. That Twenty Ten allowed me to easily do that plus more, it worked.
What is new with the blog in general?
Well instead of having a list of 5 or 6 excerpts of the posts on the front page, I have decided to feature the full text of the latest post. The idea here was to encourage people to still go to the homepage by getting the latest and greatest, and also lower the number of clicks you have to make if you do only visit the home page. Plus, I feel it is different for a blog to do it this way.
Another feature is less is more. I purposely made the banner picture at the top of the screen to be shorter in height than previous, and the standard for this theme in order to provide less stuff at the top. I wanted the menu along the head for less stuff on the side, the same with putting stuff down at the bottom of the screen. And I am pulling some of the stuff on the right side as well as some of the advertisements for the same reason. I want a faster loading page with less distractions and I feel like I got this.
I did want more color however, and I chose the colors of orange and dark blue to go along this route. I don’t think these are common colors to use, especially orange. The menu bar obviously caries the orange color, but you will also see links and text throughout the site taking on that color as well. The dark blue you will mostly find in the form of advertisements for now, but you very well may see the color crop up more in the future. You will also see darker blues than normal in the links on the right hand side.
Most menus for stuff you’ll find on the bottom (such as Recent Posts, Recent Comments, and Related Posts). However, I decided to create new content for the right bar. “Top Posts” is a section of the top 5 posts over the last 3 months. What is top is decided by a lot of factors including visited, commented, linked to, etc. “Lately by Razakius” was a solution I thought of when trying to figure out how to post other things I am doing on the net that I don’t want a full blog for. For example, I can post tweets that I thought were particularly good, or if I made a post to a bulletin board that I feel people should read, maybe I went to a play and want to post about it quick, or just a random thought. These I don’t consider real posts but interesting things going on in my life none the less. And lastly a re-do of “Previous Years” where I will feature a few posts from previous years of the current month. I’ve tried this a number of ways and while I’m not overly thrilled of the formatting for the plugin that is allowing me to do this, the old ones that I was using have broken since I originally started and it seems this functionality isn’t often done.
Finally, the feature I am almost most excited for, what I am calling tangents. The plugin was originally created for footnotes, but I am calling it tangents largely because I like to go on tangents lol. I am fairly well known for going off topic really quickly and then returning to topic (sometimes). Well the idea is this way I can go off my little tangent and then back on subject. To give you an example, I include one at the end of this sentence . [1. Hoping this works and that I continue to do it as time goes on because I think I can get some really interesting stuff out of the tangent idea.]
What’s in Store?
In the future, I plan on adding a lot more to the site. I want to round up the corners of everything, including the headers and the side. I want the sidebar to be a solid blue rather than white with blue advertisements. I have always wanted to have a section that included stuff I owned and stuff I wanted and I think I finally have the means to do it here. I just need to sit down and do it, so I plan on adding that. I also want to add an eBay store section that lists anything that I am selling on eBay (I’m planning on selling my Magic cards fairly soon). So keep looking for new features.
For those of you coming back, am glad to see you back. Hopefully I can get this thing back in gear. Thanks all.