For some time now, I have been wanting to remodel the web site. What has held me back was the inability to find a design I liked where everything worked. I finally chose to install a commercial theme rather than a free one, and what you see is the result.
The primary goal is readability. The type is larger, I’m using a serif font and the colors are good old black and white. This design is wider than before, and that will help accommodate the larger text.
At the same time I’ve removed comment nesting to make comments look not all skinny. Please consider using the Quote feature (click “Quote”) when commenting on another comment. The bold-faced version of the previous commenter is a hyperlink right back to the original comment. The little “#” at the top of the comments is a hyperlink to the comment that you could paste somewhere else. Because comment paging was turned off some time back, hyperlinks like these should work reliably and over time.
Finally, I have “gravatar enabled” comments. If you register an image associated with your email address with gravatar.com, that image will be inserted next to your name. This blog requires G-rated gravatar images. Some of you like Mike and Misha already have gravatars. Remember, putting your email address in a post header does not make it public, although I will see it. If you don’t create a gravatar, the site will make up something for you.
While there may be some tweaking of the design, this should be pretty much how it will stay.
It looks maaaarvelous. You rook maaaarvelous. 🙂
artistically………….. meh. but
keep the context and content honest and…… adjustments are easy.
oof….. how does one change the avatar.
Wow thought I was in the wrong place, let me get used to it before I comment.
This IS going to take some time to get used to. It seems that I accidently quote someone else’s comment by mistake and then gave them a poor rating when they didn’t deserve it because all of the comments seemed to be intermingled. Other than that, the new look is great.
Like the look. Clean, easy on the eyes!!!
Doc only one problem. Is there some way you can fix the quoting feature maybe have what the person you quoted their entire passage get italicized automatically? Right now its hard to see the separation unless I put a bunch of line breaks between what i write and the previous poster wrote
I like it very much.
Looks good. But then again, I like clean and simple. 🙂
Well, I really wish that any quoted text would automatically appear noticeably different than the text we type in response. At least in the old system, the indented blocks made it stand out.
Even if it just could appear in a different font color, that would help.
The way it is right now, it is very hard to distinguish where the quoted text ends and the commentator’s response begins.
You should now see quoted text indented and italicized.
It is the blockquote tag in quoted text that should make it stand out. Blockquotes are indented and italicized as you should see in this exchange. It was working find last night, but something has gone awry. [sigh]
Yeah I’m not seeing a difference really Doc
Beautiful look!! Easy to read, I like it.
..zestaaay
To change your avatar, you need to go to gravatar.com and upload an image to associate with some email address you have control over, then use that email when fill out the comment form here.
OK, it’s fixed now. You MAY need to refresh your cache to see the change (View | Reload in FireFox).
Fixed now. You MAY need to refresh your cache to see the change (View | Reload in FireFox).
I’ve been having performance issues with the site under load (not just with the new theme). I have tried some optimization techniques.
I may drop the Avatars next to comments, because all those have to be fetched from an external provider.
WordPress can quickly increase its load with additional plugins enabled. I noticed some issues on my site.
NbC: WordPress can quickly increase its load with additional plugins enabled.
And there are a fairly large number (18) of plug-ins enabled here. My hosting provider says that the All-In-One SEO Pack is a killer and I’ve dumped that one. I’m now caching the blog, the plug-ins and the Widgets.
I like the new look. I think it is more readable and that is the most important attribute for me. The old format was a little spiffier but I found it a little tougher to read than this.