Evan Sims

Everything is so shiny and new

Friends and visitors to my site may have noticed a rather dramatic change this afternoon; I decided to bite the bullet and push my redesign, even though I still have a few things left to tweak and polish. Yeah, I’m really taking a note from MobileMe’s launch on this one.

In any event, there’s nothing revolutionary about this upgrade- it’s really just an evolution of the previous design. My goal from the beginning on this was to clean things up, improve readability and have a more useful sidebar. For readability, I increased the maximum content width, increased the whitespace (particularly in the navigation) and softened the background image. For the sidebar, I’ve added Lijit back for blog search, a Disqus panel for browsing popular threads and seeing who’s active, obviously kept my FriendFeed widget, and slapped together a Brightkite location widget which I’ll be releasing shortly.

As I said, I pushed this out a little early, so I’m sure there will be bugs. If you notice any issues, please feel free to let me know in this entry’s thread. Thanks!

FriendFeed “Neo” released

It should come as no surprise to any of you that I really, really like FriendFeed, given the things I’ve done with the API and the unholy amount of time I spend browsing, commenting and liking people’s stuff. However, I’ve had a hard time converting most of my friends into “true believers” and using the service. I know it’s not for everyone, but the potential value of the service to some users seems to get lost in the UI. Me? I love it. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s precisely what I need and nothing I don’t. But, again, it’s not for everyone.

The biggest complaint I get? Hard on the eyes. No, not the design. But the color scheme. Black on white isn’t the best pallet choice when you’re potentially spending hours browsing pages. Thus, my theme FriendFeed Neo was built. It inverses the scheme, placing white text on a black background. It also softens the blues, removes the rounded edges and does nifty little things like highlight friend’s comments in threads to make them more noticeable.

I have more plans for the theme, but for now I’m releasing it so I can start getting feedback. So, please, give it a try and let me know what you think- preferably in the evansims.com room on FF or here in my blog comments.

Grab it at Userstyles.org

Thanks!