Every now and then I tend to get restless with this blog’s design, and these past few days have been a perfect example of this. Though this new design was built from the ground up, it is essentially a refreshed version of the last site design, entitled “Redux”. Hopefully I’ll slow down with the designing and concentrate on the actual content, but in the mean time, I hope you like this new design that I’ve appropriately dubbed Redux 2.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of this here blog (!), so let’s break the past year’s activity down into stats.
In the past year I have…
Here’s to another great year of Henry’s blog!
Oh yeah, I have a blog — I seem to have forgotten about that. In any case, what’s a guy to do when he lacks interest in actually blogging? Redesign his blog, of course. In launching this theme, this blog is on its third design revision in its near year of operation. I would say that out of every design this is by far my favorite.
Entitled “Redux,” this design is the result of my wanting a more minimal, toned-down design. Hopefully its succeeded in doing this. Also: now with at least improved IE compatibility, as I’ve been too lazy to ensure total compatibility, yet. Also, as of this writing I’ve not ensured W3 validity, but will do so shortly.
Any feedback is appreciated, and hopefully you enjoy the new design.
It’s been a wild past few days since unbeknown to me, an article I’d written was submitted by someone to the social news site Digg a day and a half ago.
My initial reaction was disbelief, as never before had I even dreamt of an article I’d written getting on one of my favorite sites (no less, one with over one million registered users and many more unregistered). Then came the excitement as slowly but surely more and more people dugg the article, which, for the record, I don’t even think is that amazing an article. I suppose the fact that the trailing question mark was excluded from the title, “New Google Search Feature?” may have excited people — all it was, in fact, was an error when you searched for the term “review:” on Google and I predicted from there (Digg users sure do love rumors and predictions!). Either way, after about four hours, the article hit the home page, though was quickly buried (modded down and removed from the home page by users) when Google remedied the issue and the bug I encountered couldn’t be replicated. But hey, even though I only got 70 diggs, it was really fun while it lasted; I’ll let these stats speak for themselves:
About five days ago as spring had really sprung, I thought to myself that with the new season a new design for this blog was in order. So, for those five days I worked very hard to almost entirely recreate my design. The result of this effort is what you are looking at now (if you’re in RSS, hop on over!), and I feel it’s a big improvement over the last version.
This design wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for some very kind and helpful I know from Random Shapes. These people include Jake Dahn for his honest opinions and CSS help, Anthony Cole for his critiquing, and Ranjani for her awesome logo.
Again, your feedback/issues you encounter are much appreciated.
Well, I made some minor changes to the site tonight. I added a logo-like thing next to the title, tidied up some alignments, and added a footer — just some simple things to make the design a little more pleasing.
Also, after toying around with the idea of it for a while, I’ve decided to sign up for the new tumblelog service everyone’s been talking about, Tumblr. I may start posting sidenote-type entries found here in the past to the new site, but I mainly have other intentions — those of the tumblelog acting as an aggregator for content of mine scattered around the web with different services. This is possible thanks to Tumblr’s great feed aggregation function, and I’ve set it up so that it syndicates my blog posts, Flickr photos, saved Del.icio.us links, and Diggs to the site.
This way, instead of visiting several different sites, you can now simply visit yum.henryetc.com. The name? I thought to myself, mmm, lots o’ tasty content, yum. Thus the site was born.
Enjoy.
About 15 minutes ago I attempted to upgrade this blog, which runs on WordPress, to the newest version released today, version 2.1. I had read that the database schema was changed in this release, and that it may render some plugins incompatible. Unfortunately, what I failed to realize was that my stats plugin, FireStats, was incompatible, and when I upgraded, my installation was not only fairly odd-looking in terms of the admin UI, but my main blog didn’t even function. In the end, I had to revert back to version 2.0.7, which thankfully wasn’t all too difficult.
The moral of this story? If you intend to upgrade to WordPress 2.1, I strongly suggest that you first ensure any plugins you use are on the official compatibility list, which can be found here on the WordPress wiki.
After toying around with various non custom WordPress themes for the past month or two, dissatisfied, about two weeks ago I sat down, and with my minimal design chops began constructing what you’re seeing right now. It’s a big change for the site, aesthetically and also functionality-wise (read: there’s actually a sidebar now). In addition, I’ve switched from Textpattern to the WordPress platform to manage my blog’s content.
I really couldn’t be happier to finally have a blog that looks and feels such that I can actually be proud of it.
Sidenote: I’ve done only minimal testing with this design, so I’d really appreciate it if you could either contact me, or leave a comment, if you encounter any issues.
I know, I know, it’s been way too long since I last blogged. It’s not that I haven’t felt like it, I’ve just been busy lately, and all of this past week I’ve been really sick. Soon, though, I’ll be returning to a regular update schedule (3 times a week?), and some changes will be made to the blog itself. Currently, as far as that goes, I’m contemplating a switch to WordPress, and a minimal design is in the works.
I’ll keep you posted and will be back soon (I hope).
After singlehandedly circumnavigating the globe in a dinky old sailboat, I’m back and ready for action! As far as anything at all worth noting goes, I’ve changed the site cosmetically a little, modifying the color scheme once again. Also, there’s now a link beneath the header with the extremely specific title of ‘Show/hide crap’ which shows/hides some various site information. Go ahead, I dare you to click it–wait, no–I double-dog dare you!
Edit: I made the link above just a tad more specific (hehe), and also added a sparsely-filled contact section. If you were wondering, I used the awesome script.aculo.us effects library to do the sliding feature for the different sections.
To all readers out there, I need your feedback. Just a little bit ago I changed the color scheme of the site. Previously I felt it was a little to bland and plain, and I thought some complimentary shades of blue would look pretty nice. What is/are your opinion(s), as you’re the people/person who, I hope, actually read(s) this?
