The long-awaited new design is now live. While I am sure to hear a lot of complaints about removing the old design, I feel that this design will serve us all better. Here are a few of the new features unique to this design:
Comment Equality – There is now equality between the comments in the Sideblog, Community blog and main blog. It is no longer a case of “All comments are equal but some comments are more equal than others.” All of this is to say that the comment listing now includes comments from all three parts of the blog which saves me from having three seperate lists. It will simplify the ongoing discussions.
King for a Week – This is a new area where I hope to feature a different blog each week. The last several headlines from that blog will appear on my site for a week. Consider it a tribute to blogs I feel are worthy of being read.
Store – It is not actually a store, but links to a few different ways people can support this site.
Portfolio – Because I receive so many questions from readers of this site about my web design work I have decided to add some portfolio items directly to the site. This area is still under development.
Trackback page – There is now a dedicated page that will list the last 20 or so trackbacks that have been sent to this site.
Expanded, annotated blogroll – Having been berated countless times for my pathetic blogroll, I have finally expanded and even annotated it.
Email subscription – I have added an email subscription feature whereby anyone can sign up to receive daily digest emails of the articles posted to the site. Check the toolbox area for more information.
Paginated category and date-based archives – This is a small touch but one that makes browsing categories and archives easier. Rather than having all items appear on one page, the items are now broken into pages of ten results per page.
Year at a glance – This feature allows a person to quickly find any entries posted on a particular date. I’m guessing that I will use this feature more than anyone else.
Bells and whistles – I added various other bells and whistles. Among them are smooth scrolling (scroll down to the bottom of a page and click “back to top” to see it in action) and various visual clues to which links you have visited, which will take you to a location outside of my site, etc.
The site was created to take advantage of certain features that are only available in Firefox. Thus the site does look moderately better in Firefox than in Internet Explorer. I trust that with the release of Internet Explorer 7 next year the gap will close to some extent.
I am both eager and worried as I anticipate your reaction to this new design. Fire away!
