The New Look

Posted by Stropp on July 9, 2007

It’s nearly 1AM and I’ve spent most of the day on the blog upgrade, and it’s finally done. This will be a quick post before I get to bed, and hopefully not too incoherent.

The biggest changes are the removal of the advertising banners, and the inclusion of a poll widget. Unfortunately the advertising really cluttered up the look and feel of the blog. I’m still considering some link advertising, but it won’t interfere with the look. The best thing about that is that I’ll be able to control what gets advertised. With Adwords I was unable to prevent the gold selling and power leveling services ads. At least they’re gone.

The poll is done using the Democracy plug-in. It has a couple of minor flaws, but seems quite usable. I might go over the code when I get a chance and see if I can make some fixes. In fact you should probably expect to see some tweaking over the next few weeks. I want to implement some different plugins, but it’s getting late.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the theme that I commissioned. I decided it was time to get something done and went hunting for a free theme that would suit the blog and modified it a bit. I’m a little disappointed with that whole situation, but at least I didn’t break the bank on it.

I’ve tested it on Firefox 2, Opera 9.2 and IE7. Aside from the footer in Opera going a bit berko, the theme appears to work in those three browsers. If you are using another browser I’d appreciate you leaving me a comment to let me know if the theme works in your browser. I’d especially like to know how it looks in IE6 since my stats show that most of my readers still use it.

So. Do you like the look? Have a vote on the poll and/or leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think.

Update: Sleep is good. I found a couple of things that I missed last night, and I’ve spent some time today tidying up the categories and the blogroll. I forgot to mention that I also updated Wordpress to the latest version. It all seems good except for one thing. For some insanely stupid reason, the Wordpress Write page no longer Previews the article, you have to open the preview in a new link. I couldn’t believe it. What were they thinking?

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