My eyes are cooked, my ass is numb, my fingers are cramped… the redesign is done!
For anyone not reading this in their RSS feed reader or on a splog, the changes should be pretty apparent. But I’m going to run through some of them anyway 🙂
First, I should mention, I’m not a big fan of switching themes. I think a blog develops some of its character from the look of it, and if it’s changing all the time, I feel it takes something away from it all.
That said, I really wanted to have a design that was all mine. Design, coded and styled from the ground up by me. It’s actually a little pecular that this site, my first, was the last one to get its own custom design.
Well, I should give some credit to Chris Murphy at Far From Fearless for giving me some healthy inspiration. His excellent design played a heavy influence in how I wanted my new look to look.
So, what’s new?
The blogroll has been shortened. Instead of listing one massively long list of links, I’ve limited it to a short random selection that changes every time the page loads. You can see all the links on the Links page.
The comments are now equipped with Gravatars. If you don’t know what Gravatars are, here’s the definition from the site:
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?
It’s a cool way for you to personalize your comments on this blog, or any blog that supports gravatars. You just sign up for a free Gravatar account, upload your photo, and it does the rest. It works off of the e-mail you use when you comment. So if you sign up now all the posts you’ve commented on here will magically show your pretty picture.
Another change I tried to keep focused on with the redesign was attempting to clean up my sidebar. It’s not perfect, but it’s a bit more thought out than the previous one.
I’ve done my best to make everything as cross-browser compatible as possible, but I’ve very likely missed a few things here or there. Please let me know if anything is acting stupid.
Well, it’s 2 a.m., and I have to host a “Last Day Of English Summer Camp” party tomorrow morning… this boy needs sleep.
And for anyone that’s curious:
Version One of this blog was the initial blog I started upon moving to China back in January 2005.
Version Two was when I first moved to WordPress.
