Major news. Look around you. You already know what it is (unless you’re reading from an RSS reader. If so, come to the blog to see the new look). I’m going to point out a few new features/ improvements on the old design as well as talking a bit about the change. If you find any pages or features that are not working or look weird, let me know. I haven’t had a chance to test everything, so getting it out in public will fix any problems.

On to the new stuff. My first goal was stripping everything. I wanted to get the blog down to it’s fundamentals and trash everything else. I didn’t like having a bounded border. I wanted it to be free, so the background is an elegant white without any division for the content. I also expanded the width of the content section from 400px to 550px, which let’s the content have more of a presence while still fitting fine on a 800×60 monitor. I tightened up the sidebar to everything being 165px to give it very strong vertical lines on both the left and right. I’ve also stripped, stripped, stripped the sidebar. Just an about me, my twitter, and links to my projects. By the way, let me know what you think of the sidebar images (ShowYourself, Todos, etc). I think they are kind of fun and look like the new internet ads that are popping up around the mac blogs and websites.

I’ve added a new navigation section at the very top, and moved the search bar into it. There is Blog, About, Favorite Posts, and Contact. Other than the Articles page these are all new. They are pretty simple but look really nice (I think). The search box also looks pretty cool over here on Safari, not sure how great it looks on other browsers. Up in the right corner I have the RSS feed button. I wanted to get the RSS feed noticed, so I put it out of the layout as well as in the upper right, usually where people go to look for the RSS icon in their browser’s url box.

The pagination at the bottom is cool, and I think something that should be built right into WordPress. It’s so much easier to scroll through page numbers than to go through “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts.”

One last change. The front page now only shows excerpts of the post instead of the whole post, which speeds up page display (no large images) and condenses content so you can pick through what you want to read easily.

Basically, what I wanted was something fresh, simple, and elegant. I wanted something fast and small for the quickest load times. I hope I got what I wanted and what you, as readers, want. If you have any comments or suggestions or bugs, please post in the comments. I love your feedback.

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