New blog design – a work in progress
As you can see I’ve had a bit of a clean up around here…
The blog design is now much whiter and simpler, with a clearer emphasis on the content of the blog posts. Because I needed a swift solution I’ve based the design on the excellent Wu Wei theme by Jeff Ngan. Not only is the typography of this theme neat, but it also is a very easy theme to customise if you know some HTML – no complicated functions.php files. The site is of course running with WordPress still.
One of the main reasons for the upgrade was the incompatibility of my old theme with Topsy, Sociable and other equivalent plugins to share content on various social networks. Those buttons have now been added – question now is whether anyone is going to use them!
Secondly I’ve been meaning to reorganise the content here for some time, reflecting the changing focus of my work and my interests. The blog now has only 4 categories – EUPolitics, UKPolitics, techPolitics and notPolitics. The first three of these are rather self explanatory, and all my other musings will end up in ‘notPolitics’. There’s a link to each of these in the top menu, and RSS feeds for each (and for combinations of the categories) can be found here.
A few things need to be tidied up still (the footer for sure), and the site hasn’t been tested in IE at all yet, so it’s very much a work in progress. But better to make a start I reasoned!
Looks good on iPad and in IE7! (only the last tweet box doesn’t load, but maybe a network problem)
On the design: I particularly like the gravatar picture in the header. I think this is a prototype for a personal web blog header where a photo of the author becomes more and more standard.
On colours: Why not change the grey on white header to a white on red one? There you have your party colours 🙂
Like it – clean, crisp. And works fine in IE8, from what I’ve seen so far.
I really must sort out my own at some point…
@rose22joh – was wondering about that… maybe my pursuit of clean, white design has taken it too far away from party political colours! I’ll see how some of that can be re-instated.
Looking good! Feels like a distancing from party politics colours – or was that coincidental?
@Eurogoblin – oh how I wish there was a way to pull CC stuff from Flickr! That’s actually one of the things I am working out how to do – whether it’s worth doing some image rights thing with custom tags, or just manually adding a div class=”” as I have for the CC box above.
@James – agree, it makes a good change. Allows new things to be done here… Plus moving to London has already given me renewed determination to blog…
Jon,
Like it a lot. Great change. I can well imagine that a new theme is something akin to moving house or office, it gives you a renewed spring in your step.
Look forward to reading as always.
James
I’ve done some pretty extensive modding of the Wu Wei theme – it’s a dream to edit and the author is very responsive to questions. I like the ability to “pull” pictures past the text margins (as you’ve done above).
Are you using anything to automatically pull the Creative Commons credits in from Flickr, btw? A plugin like that (but better than the intrusive Zoomla) would be great.
You’ve said you’re not finished with the redesign – so I’ll reserve opinion till you’re done (I agree with you about the footer, though!). Suffice to say that Wu Wei is an excellent theme. Good choice!