Friday, April 23, 2010

Redesign notes

I got a little distracted by... ooo shiny thing over there... oh sorry... by general web design stuff and stumbled across the new Blogger 'In Draft' features (basically Google Apps for Blogger). The new design is still a work in progress, for instance, I'm not wild about the background pic, but it's a little taste of things to come. Just a few things to note on here now:
  • New social bookmarking links on the right - these will likely be expanded and changed slightly, but you get the idea. Easily add DNI to Delicious, Digg, Facebook, etc. NOTE: To avoid the massive amounts of spam this could generate, please add a personal message whenever a service allows it, so I know you are a human, or at least partly human.
  • New tag cloud spinning ball thingy. I like the way it looks, but I'll probably replace it with something that takes up the same amount of space and doesn't have the processor overhead involved in this neat little ditty.
  • News feed - I'm forgetting which things I said I would 'star' versus 'share' in Google Reader, so for now it is set to my Starred items. Again, this will soon be replaced by a more snazzy widget that is more multi-functional. But I'd like to get the rss feed items up there so that visitors can keep up on the news items I've noted.
  • More complex layout - Personal/contact info at the top, minimal. News/feeds in a wider column format. Utility links, like archives, in narrowed columns within the right column. There's some tweaking to be done, like too much padding and combining elements, but it's pretty close to what I want.
  • Color! Yeah, I know. Shocking! I like blue.
Anyhow, enjoy! And feel free to leave any comments if you like certain things or you spot any major problems. The site renders fine in Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, and mostly in IE (tag cloud fails to render, so another reason to replace that).

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