Same Blog | New Look

Time for another design update for the ol’ blog. It’s been almost 2 years since the last makeover, which along with less frequent blog posts is a likely result of increased facebook / twitter usage.

WordPress, the back-end to this site, has made some significant progress and is now at version 2.8.x. The developers and community have done a great job making it more user-friendly in posting, managing and maintaining. Version updates are now one-click as well as plugin installs and updates. No more fiddling around with zip files and FTP.

For this latest re-design, I went with a theme called Carrington that I’ve been keeping an eye on and wanting to learn more about. It is developed as a complete CMS theme framework, which is way beyond what I need, but interesting to look into (at least for me).

The layout of the front page is pretty similar to the previous version. The biggest change is moving the moblog pics to the top bar. I have also jazzed up the Archives page to make it more visual.

There are more changes to the secondary pages due to the new theme, such as Tag, Category and Date Archive pages, which can be accessed in the sidebar. And partly with the new theme, I have made some of the page elements context sensitive depending on what type of pages you are on. For example, when you are on a post page, you can see a list of Related Posts in the sidebar, along with the clutter of front page badges hidden.

So far, this re-design looks to be pretty functional and stable. As always, if you see something that isn’t working, please let me know.

P.S. I meant to publish this post last week, but I got distracted trying to do some integration of posts and comments with Facebook, but the coding is just not quite there yet as a workable solution.