You may notice that something looks a different on this website today. It’s a new theme for the blog that I’ve been tinkering with for the past couple months. So after much fiddling around in Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and WordPress, I’m ready to debut it to the world (though I might decide to revert back to the old one temporarily until I fix some of the kinks).
Why a new theme?
- I wanted to make the blog a little more colorful and less visually boring
- I wanted to display more information without sacrificing usability
- I wanted to take out some of the old blog features and add some new ones
Some of the new features you’ll notice on the blog include:
- Permanent links to the comments section of each article, and permanent links to each individual comment
- Numbered comments that are a little easier to follow
- Lefthand column with links to all my various websites, including stuff like my Flickr and MySpace pages
- Slightly cleaner HTML behind the scenes
- RSS feeds now show article summaries, not just the first paragraph of the article
- A corner of rotating photos of Yours Truly
I’m a bit of a perfectionist, though, and so there are a number of things that I’m not quite satisfied with. Among those:
- The top column is a little too cramped to accommodate the pictures in the posts that have them. (See this post and this post.) The all-text posts have a much cleaner look. (Update: Cleaned up most of the posts that were causing problems.)
- The Infoquake promotional box in the left column doesn’t feel like it’s in the right place.
- I messed up the CSS somewhere along the way, and as a result the left margin of the central column is two or three pixels off in some places. (Update: Fixed.)
- The “Next Entries” and “Previous Entries” navigational links need graphical icons. (Update: Fixed.)
- The footer doesn’t always land in the right place. Sometimes it’s too far down.
- There should be a little bit more white space, especially at the top of the page where the sidebars live. (Update: Fixed.)
- I need to add the coComment integration scripts back in. (Update: Fixed.)
- I don’t like how the list of allowed tags in the comments box looks. Too cluttery. (Update: Fixed.)
- The Firefox AdBlock extension blocks out the navigational icons in the link bar at the top of every article.
- I still need to find a place for my blogroll. Ideally I’d like a sidebar box that displays 10 random links from a much longer list of friends and favorites, along with a link to the complete list. That way you wouldn’t have to wade through those interminable and unreadable blogrolls that include everybody in the Western hemisphere. (Exhibit A.) (Update: Fixed. Also, see Exhibit A (Teresa Nielsen Hayden)’s comments below.)
Of course, this being WordPress, and WordPress being as kludgy and temperamental as it is, there are a number of things I can’t get working properly. (Remind me to resume my rant about how overhyped open-source software is.) Such as:
- An archives index that displays posts by month, year, or just post-by-post. You’d think that would be an easy task. No. The instructions for how to do it on the WordPress Codex are all but incomprehensible, and I can’t seem to get it working properly. You can navigate to individual months just fine if you edit the URLs, but I can’t get an automatically generated page to save my life. (Update: Fixed.)
- Paged permalinks aren’t working properly, a notorious problem in WordPress. Try clicking on the Infoquake category, and then click on the “previous entries” link at the top of the article. You get — well, I’m not entirely sure, but it’s not what you’re supposed to get.
- Speaking of permalinks, I’d like to redo the permalink structure altogether — so instead of https://davidlouisedelman.com/blog/index.php/2006/12/18/new-look/ you’d see something like https://davidlouisedelman.com/blog/new-look/. Good luck getting this to work on a Windows server. (And the first one who says “that’s why you need to switch to Linux and Apache” will get a swift kick in the teeth. Oh, not from me. The universe will just spontaneously deliver one to you for being so irritating.)
- Category archives are sorting in descending chronological order (most recent article first), while dated archives are sorting in ascending chronological order (most recent article last).
- I want to have an “e-mail this article” link in the gray navigation bar at the top of every post, but I can’t seem to get any of those plug-ins working. I think they’re conflicting with some of my other plug-ins (another notorious WordPress problem).
I’ve tested the new look in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer for Windows, and it seems to display fine in each browser. Mac and Linux I haven’t tested. This screenshot (PNG, 65k) shows what the blog is supposed to look like. If anyone sees any drastic layout errors in their browser, I would really appreciate a comment below, or just e-mail me a screenshot.
And does anybody have any idea what that graphical symbol I put next to the headlines is? I found it while poking through Wingdings fonts, and liked it enough to make it a graphical cue for the story headline. It reminded me of a leaf. But now I’m looking at it and wondering if I’ve inadvertently stuck the Chinese symbol for leaky diaper at the top of every blog post.
Oh yeah — and what do you think of the new look? Be honest, now.