Yes, I’ve redesigned the site yet again. I’ve done it 3 (well, 3.5) times now, so I’m almost a real blogger!
To tell the truth, the last design (which I will soon have up on the “Design” page– right now that’s the only thing that’s not working yet, as far as I know) looked good and all, but it didn’t really speak to the functionality of the site, which was to put what I write in front of you as fast as possible. Sure, I had planned to start writing for other sites, and link to it with those big headlines when I got something published, but as you could probably have seen, not too much has been published lately.
And I found something else interesting about those big headlines. Because my work wasn’t immediately accessible (aka on the front page), I found that I didn’t write as much. Posting here became a much more formal process. I had to make sure a piece was completely polished before I sent it out into the world, because it required at least a click from you to be read. That’s right– hiding my pieces behind a headline actually made me more of a perfectionist. Before, when I was just posting one entry per day, I’d whip something up and send it out, knowing full well that in 24 hours it would be gone. But with those headlines, things stuck around, and the sight of the site piling up made me actually not want to write as much. Weird, I know.
So I decided to compromise. Yes, I realize it looks much more like a regular blog than anything you’ve seen here, but all the usual suspects that have always been here are still around. Miniblog entries (which I was writing longer anyway) have been upgraded to the main panel. Podcast entries are now in a seperate category, and have a neat little icon next to them, as do Discussion entries like this one. I think it’s a great way to link you to my other projects on here, because Happy Time and The Board have been picking up steam on their own.
You like those icons? I do. You can find out where I got them on the new About page, and when you’re done with that, go check the archives.
And behind the scenes, things are buttered up, too. I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0, I smoothed away some plugins with my own custom PHP, and I’m now using WP’s template system that will allow me to change the site even more. Oh, and if you care, URLs are prettier now– instead of the old “?p=xxx,” they actually give you some useful information about the posts.
And I’ve hidden some other new things around the site too.
So as long as I’ve created this discussion thing, let’s use it. After you’ve read this post, click on the link below and go discuss the new redesign over on The Board. If you haven’t made a login yet, do it, and get talking with the other cool people that frequent this crazy site o’mine. Thanks as always for reading, and now that I’ve redesigned, I promise (yet again) that new content is going to be here all the time.
Discuss this post over at
The Board.
This post has related audio! Listen to the show over at Happy Time.
