Posts Tagged: redesign

Thoughts / Web — View Comments
4
Dec 09

December 2009 Redesign

It’s been 10 months since my previous site redesign– practically a record, considering how often I usually change things around here– but I felt it was time for a fresh look for the ol’ blog. Abstract, as I’m calling it, is an original WordPress theme I built that’s super flexible and has a lot of neat features.

  • Live Search – Check out that text box to your left. Try searching for something and behold it’s AJAXy goodness.
  • Dynamic Archives – Also powered by AJAX. No pages to have to link through; the list grows as you scroll.
  • Twitter Mentions – Each blog post (and a few of the pages) include a “Twitter” tab. The tab lists any mention of the page’s long or short permalink structure. It uses the excellent Backtype API to accomplish this. I developed it originally against the Twitter Search API, only to discover how awful they are at retaining data like this. Backtype works flawlessly and has a very respectable retention history.

Of course, the most obvious changes are the revised color scheme and layout. I got sick of the dark look, so I replaced it with a more eye-friendly, lighter appearance. There’s also a few new pages hidden around, if you take a look.

So, I hope you enjoy the new look. I’ll hopefully be releasing the theme in a month or two after I give it the old dog food treatment and work out the kinks.

Thoughts — View Comments
17
Jul 08

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!