A Fresh New Look
October 6th, 2006 by Mark Rittman
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve given the site a bit of a spring clean, with a new look-and-feel and a move over to Wordpress. I’ve also taken the opportunity to remove much of the “cruft” from the site, and made a once-off move to remove all of the backwards compatibility between old page references and the current page layout, as this was holding me back from redeveloping the site and bringing it more up-to-date.
Unfortunately, it does mean all the page references on Google and so forth will now be broken, however I’ll try and put some server-side redirects in place for the more popular pages. In the meantime, page load times should be much faster, I’ll be able to add content more easily, and it’s all now standards-compliant and all that stuff.
I’ve also replaced the Oracle BLAF theme with one that’s a bit more interesting, and like Doug with his “Housemate of the Month”, I’ll be swapping out the title picture every so often as I go on my travels. For now, you’ve got a nice view of Tallinn Old Town taken on my visit to Estonia last week.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Your link to wordpress has a typo.
should be: http://wordpress.org/
I like wordpress, as it is accesible out of the box, and with some minor things to remember, you can make sure that it stays that way.
October 6th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Nice picture, site looks a lot better this way, never liked BLAF look and feel.
October 7th, 2006 at 4:13 am
I like the new look very much better than the old. Just two things: the search function needs to be on more pages than just the home one, I’d guess. And, two: your navigation thingy on the left doesn’t work properly in Opera 9. Use it to visit, say, ‘Consulting’, and then try and get back to the home page using it!
Oh, OK: a third thing: it would be nice, I’d say, if you could aggregate your archives so that the 2003 and 2004 ones (at least) are displayed per year, not per month. Your home page is simply going to get longer and longer over time otherwise, and getting to your blogroll get progressively harder and harder. You could always get a calendar, of course!
October 7th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Did you visit my blog in the 30 minutes of recent theme trials when I had a similar look
- but it’s a nice clean look, well picked!
The only thing missing (for me) is a URL to get directly to the blog - I only seem able to find the old front page! I could then update the link on my blog (so it’s in your own interest, Mark!)
The archive list, as Howard, says gets unusable for a person with as much history as you, the calendar is far more compact but not quite so quick to use when locating an old month, but it does give tool tip to list the articles in the month. But do people really know when something was written last year?
October 7th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Robert - cheers, well spotted, I’ve corrected it now.
Howard - thanks for the tips. I’m a bit beholden to the template I’ve used, at least at the moment. The layout, in terms of calendar/no calendar, display of archives and so on is down to the template rather than options I’ve chosen. I’ll have a poke around with the CSS and PHP files soon though. I must admit though, I do like the long list of months, it helps to convey how long the blog has run, which I think is part of it’s appeal (from an Oracle BI&W history perspective). Good points though, I’ll factor them in soon.
Pete - tough luck, looks like I got to the template first! Not sure about the calendar idea, I know I had it in the past, but I’m not sure how good a navigation aid it is though (as opposed to an easily recognisable element that distinguishes the site as a blog). I’ll see if there’s a plugin to produce a calendar though, see how it looks, especially considering Howard’s points.
October 10th, 2006 at 3:03 am
Hi Mark,
I like the new layout, but I could not find as much Discoverer information on the new site, as the old. Hopefully the links and articles can be put back online.
October 10th, 2006 at 11:28 am
Mark,
The layout looks nice in general, however have you noticed a lot of pictures do not fit on the page and are only shown partly? Anyway you could fix that?