Introducing, the all new Scatterism.
February 2nd, 2006 • General
Finally, I was able to free up some time to redesign this blog and give it a bit more refreshing look. The old design was growing old, and I felt that if I’m going to get back to blogging then I need to start over again.
I was supposed to finish the mini-project a while ago, but things happen. I went through a varicose veins surgery that took me 3 weeks already to recover, and I still need a little more time. I’m alright now though, I didn’t get a funny walk, and my reproductive organs are safe and sound (phew).
Anyways, so back to the good news. I switched from MoveableType to Wordpress. To be honest, I was going to upgrade MT, so I took a look at SixApart’s latest 3.2, and I have to tell, it wasn’t all that impressive, MT is sort of dead, the buzz has subdued, and compared to Wordpress’s impressive collection of plugins, MT’s repository fades in comparison.
I’m not really sure why Wordpress got all the buzz, maybe because of its simplicity, or its sensible choice of defaults, maybe it has tons of cute-looking themes, but it doesn’t matter anyway, as long as it works. That’s exactly the reason I switched, I didn’t want to work a on implementing tags, I didn’t want to rebuild, I didn’t want to make sure of every little detail, oh yeah, and I support GPL :)
The new design is much more minimalistic than the older one, this time I tried to pay attention to tiny little obnoxious details, like the forms, the link colors, the “About this entry” box, the search that highlights keywords, abbreviations, well and few other things. To me, the site feels much cleaner and much more readable.
From now on, the main page on displays one and only one entry, if you want to read older entrires, either subscribe to this site’s RSS feed or check out the archives. The only thing that I might add in the near future is a list of the latest 5 titles and their excerpts. This should fit fine with the my posting frequency, since I’m going to post once day at max.
I got rid of the links to validate this site, I figured that regular visitors shouldn’t really care if the site validates, and those who care probably have Web Developer Extension installed or FireBug installed, so you guys can pretty much figure if the site validates (and yes, it does, in case you’re wondering).
For the header, I used an image replacement technique found on Dave Shea’s Mezzoblue, if you scroll down, you’ll find it. I also got rid of the unneeded information at the bottom of each post, like the number of comments, the extremely-precise date of publishing, the word “Permalink” which I thought sounds like some medicine to enhance your sex life.
Here’s a little dirty detail, the XHTML is source-ordered. This might not sound like a big deal until you try viewing this site with CSS disabled. I really care about my content showing before the essentially-useless sidebar. I mean, if you’re comming here, then you’re comming here to read something, I’m sure you’d hate to scroll down, way below the sidebar, to get to the content. The only thing that shows up before is the site’s title and the main menu, which is merely a few links. Man I love CSS.
This is it, more or less. The site is still work-in-progress, but it’s mostly completely. If there’s anything you think I shoudl change, please drop me an email, I’d love to hear more about it.
I guess that’s all the good news, I’m back to bloggin’ baby!