New design

I changed the design of this site last night, so bear with some hiccups. A quick summary of the changes (this is as much for my own benefit as anything, so feel free to ignore):

• I’m using a modified version of Bryan Bell’s “Candid Blue“ theme for Radio. Modifications include removal of the Radio calendar (most users tended not to rely on that as a navigation aid, so I ditched it), addition of my blogroll (using activeRenderer; I maintain the blogroll as an OPML outline in Radio), inclusion of the search engine box, and changes to the itemTemplate to include itemTitle and comments.


• Moved from 3-column to 2-column layout. Not only does this leave more room on the page for the main content, but it renders the text readable on any number of browsers. For the first time, I can read my blog on my phone. (The comments even work, which shocked me.) The layout is extremely simple – I may tune it up at some point down the road, but overall this is the look I was going for.


• Stopped using activeRenderer to “collapse” prior days on the home page; I’d decided that this wasn’t intuitive for people who don’t visit the site regularly. It just resulted in hiding prior content and making it harder to read.


• CSS is now incorporated into the template pages, instead of being contained within a separate CSS file. This helps with presentation when I’m working offline.


• Cleaned up my blogroll. Hadn’t updated it in at least six months, so I was able to delete some stale links, add some new ones and streamline the overall organization.


• I recently added Stephen Downes’ referral script to my template. The result is that any incoming referrals are captured – in this way, visitors to the home page can see where other visitors have come from; presumably, these links would be potentially interesting to some readers.


• Streamlined my liveTopics implementation, by moving away from multiple_words to “multiple words” now that lT supports multi-word topics.

For those reading this through e-mail or an aggregator, feel free to stop by the site and let me know what you think. As always, browser reports are welcome – if something doesn’t look right in your browser of choice, well, then just buy WinXP and use IE 6. (Or tell me what’s wrong. Either way works for me.)