Blog — Tag

It has been a long time since I gave serious thought into a new theme for the blog. A new theme tends to make me interested in blogging on it again, and with the dropping number of posts lately, you could say I needed it!

The last new blog refresh was way back in November 2006 and has since taken a life of its own really. At the start of this year I was just trying to come up with something brand new. In the end I decided against it and just give the current theme a major refresh. And here it is…

This theme was actually all about lightening the load, as that is what all my previous version attempted to do. Javascripts and Styles were sent to their own file if possible, and the image load has been greatly reduced. There are small nicities about, for example, try go to a page that doesn’t fit the screen height (a tweet for example), and click on that search link to the right.

Also, the image borders are done dynamically, and are all thanks to this technique from The Shape of the Days. Thanks to the little bit of demo code, I was able to adapt it to apply to images as well as the videos (yes, the videos are now a bit more obvious).

The comment sections have had a major overhaul in a back to the basics way, and now include your Gravatar.

Under the hood, I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.6.1.

Let me know of problems.

I’ve gone out and signed up for a del.icio.us account. I’m finally joining the social bookmarking craze! I’ll be integrating it with the blog eventually (so then I don’t have to remember to write up Links posts). In the mean time, you can check it out.

• My Del.icio.us Page

Feel free to add yourself as a friend or fan or whatever it is (I haven’t played with it long), and feel free to tell me about yours below.

As you can tell, there have been a lot of changes to the website. Here’s a run down.

• New navigation links - to the right, you’ll notice that the main links of the site have nice large buttons for you to click on.
• Shoutbox - Also to the right, leave a message in the live shoutbox. That’s right, it is live, you’ll see the updates to the discussion as they happen (almost).
• Tags - I can now tag posts using Technorati style keywords. You’ll notice them and you can click them to see the others.
• Combined Archives - The archives pages have all been combined into a single archives page, which has the tags (with real tag cloud functionality), months and categories.
• New About Me page - I’ve decided to put some stuff on it.
• coComment integration - I’ve told you about this before, and now this site is integrated with it. You don’t need to be signed up to track them either!
• Search box moved - It’s now in the top right.

Some things may be broken over the next couple of days, just put it in the shoutbox and I’ll take note.

You know what has annoyed me about blogs? The comments, you never get any word about replies and stuff, and I’m too lazy to keep a track of every post I’ve commented on. I comment here and there, and the more interesting discussions I would head back to. But sometimes I like to receive notifications when it plays out.

You may have noticed that on my blog there is a small checkbox that e-mails you when there are any replies. I’m not sure if that really does work. (In a small roll-out sometime in the next week, that will be gone though.)

In comes coComment. It’s a service that tracks your comments, and notifies you of replies, all on one page. I only just started using it, so I haven’t experienced it fully yet, but I hope to get there. There are two ways of using it. You can either download a tiny Firefox extension (works in Fx 2.0) which will automatically latch on to any comment forms about. If you don’t have Firefox, you can use a bookmarklet to put on your links toolbar and click that on any post you are going to comment on.

You can even browse sites comments, join in the big discussions (there is one with almost 1000 comments).

It seems to still be in its infancy at the moment (it started this year), but seems very popular already. Another Web 2.0 success story?