Brown: The New Black
13 April 2007
A little over a year after I first started this blog I’ve decided it’s time for an upgrade. Behind the scenes Blogtender now runs the shiny new Wordpress 2.1, aka ‘Ella’, but more importantly I’ve made several fundamental changes to the design of the pages.
I was unhappy with my previous effort for several reasons. While I was proud of having designed the previous theme from the ground up (with plenty of help from the kubric theme for reference), once the site was running live I never bothered to get it really polished. That meant no comments for one thing, and a front page that looked like a dog had chewed it when viewed on a PC. As a Mac user I have to confess to not loosing much sleep over this, but with over 90% of my (admittedly few) visitors running some form of windows, it seemed that this was an important thing to get right this time.
My previous design was fine for short posts, with a tiny, 320×240, thumbnail sized image. Coincidentally, this just happened to be the size of the photos taken by my new-at-the-time Sharp GX10 camera phone. With just one post on the main page, the new design forces me to make the effort to actually write something long enough to push the ‘fold’ down the screen a bit, hopefully resulting in something worth reading. I’m also giving myself a new standard image size, a glorious 500 pixels wide. Coincidentally, this just happens to be the width of the medium size images at flickr.
I’m not quite finished with the footer, but for now I’m happy enough to ‘go live’ so I can finish testing / tweaking things properly.
I’m pretty happy with the way it’s turned out, and I’m really looking forward to writing some decent entries. I’ve decided that based on my previous blogging efforts a reasonable goal for myself is 12 good posts by the end of the year: a little less than 2 a month, which certainly seems do-able. I’ll also be using the site as an online portfolio as in the last year I’ve done some work I’m really proud of, so there’s a bunch of entries there to work on already.
