17 July 2010

The State of the Blog, 17 July 2010

A weekend post? Again?

Well, why not?

After all, it’s Saturday, so I might as well post an update post.

By now you’ve possibly already seen the revamping I’ve done on the blog. Obviously there are massive appearance differences, but there’s some other stuff going on too. Let’s walk through some of it, shall we?

1) The new, glossy paint job. Yep. Changed the template, colour scheme, and so on. This layout gives the posts a wider section to be ‘printed’ in, making articles don’t look quite as long, as well as allowing the occasional Youtube video to not need to be resized. The background image is temporary until I can come up with something that appeals to me more. Speaking of background images…I’ve also got a logo for the blog up…that may well change in the coming days/weeks. Patience…Rome wasn’t built in a day, and all that.

2) On the posts themselves: we have quick button links to share posts on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Buzz and Blogger. Additionally, I’ve added a little reaction section, where you can click to say if you thought the post was funny or interesting or cool.

3) Over to the right: quick links for subscribing to the feeds via Newsgator, Netvibes, Atom, Bloglines, Google or My Yahoo. The same can be done for comments as well. Also on the right side is a pages directory. Right now all we have are the main blog feed page and a page for people interested in blog coverage (as mentioned 2 weeks ago), but this will be changing and expanding over time.

4) Finally, and also on the right side, there’s a poll. Yes, a poll! Reader interaction time! I’ll be posting a new poll every 2 weeks or so…please take part!

There will be more additions and changes in the weeks to come, so be patient, and please feel free to let me know what you think of things as we go along.

I’ve got a lot of content for next week, and we’ll be kicking things off, as usual, with Magma Monday. I’m glad to see that some of you have really been enjoying that feature…it has been very enjoyable for me writing it. Speaking of which, I had better get to that, so if you’ll excuse me, I have a hot date with the Trilogie au Triannon boxed set.

See you all Monday!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, I finally get to comment: I like the new look; but, I had some trouble loading it recently. It might be my PC which is old and on an old Windows ME.
How did you design the logos (bill's prog blog?) I see it spellchecks for me, too! The voting is gone now though: interesting; cool; etc. On a side note, I sent you a comment on your personal blog asking you if you like the group Hydrogyn, with Jeff Young of Megadeath past.
Anyway, great to have you back posting on great prog bands!
Gary