Moving house, redecorating…

Yes, a very different look to this website: I’ve moved. (Well, in virtual-terms, anyway).

I’d had long-running problems with my previous hosting-provider, and was running out of space there anyway, so it was time to move to something with a bit more space and (I hope!) rather more reliability.

It’s been – let’s say? – a somewhat non-trivial challenge, so it’s taken far longer than I’d hoped or expected. I’ve held back on doing any posts in the meantime, to avoid yet more complications in an already tangled move-process, so I’ve built up a bit of a backlog. There are still a fair few loose-ends to tidy up, and two more main websites to move, but it looks like it’s working well enough so far.

And yes, I do know that this isn’t the most visually wonderful of website themes, but it’s the only one I’ve found so far that actually works. My main criteria were that it has be a good fit for a plain ordinary weblog; to be responsive – in other words, work smoothly on everything from a large desktop-box all the way down to a small-screen smartphone; and that it also will work with older browsers, right the way back to IE7 and preferably to IE6. (That’s because almost 25% of visitors to this site still use those older browsers – and yes, that statistic surprised me too.)

Of the literally hundreds of themes that I scanned as possibilities, I think I must have tested at least at least three dozen that claimed to fully fit the criteria. So far I’ve found precisely three that actually do so; and of those, this was the only one that could (with only minor battles) be configured to work well with a blog. And I still haven’t yet managed to get the related-posts plug-in to work properly on this site. Humph. But even if it ain’t wonderful, I also didn’t dare delay only longer, and it’ll do for now, I hope?

One change you probably will like is that the front-page now only shows blog-post summaries – so you won’t have to wait for the entirety of every post to load on your smartphone. 🙂 Click on the title-link to get to the full post-content, of course.

Let me know what you think of it, anyway – and any suggestions for a better theme/layout would be most welcome.

Over to you?

5 Comments on “Moving house, redecorating…

  1. I like it! It’s well organized with a light background and black characters. But, then there’s that ‘Tags’ section, which is found on a lot of websites. I just don’t get the fontflail? Like I’m supposed to get excited about tags! Small, then large, and larger, up and down – it’s even in Viagra Blue!!

  2. Tom,

    I like this deign more than the previous one.

    And the overall experience, so far from PC (FF) and from Meego phone (FF and Opera), is very good.

  3. Myron, Leo, Ivo – many thanks for the feedback, it really helps!

    Myron – the ‘fontflail’ on the tags section isn’t there just for decoration, the font-size also indicates the relative number of posts on which that tag is used (mouse-hover over any tag to see the respective post-count). That’s only the most-popular tags, by the way: when I checked just now, I discovered (to my mild horror!) that I’ve actually used a total of 624 different tags so far on this weblog… ouch! 🙂 And, yes, I’m not exactly a fan of the ‘Viagra Blue’ either: I’ll change it as soon as I can, though I’ll admit I’m not very keen about diving into the maze of CSS-definitions behind this theme…!

    Leo – many thanks for the Twitter-exchange regarding the blog home-page: yes, you’re right, the best configuration would be to have the current post in full, and then all the others (i.e. the next nine, going backwards in time) as brief summaries – though preferably a line or two longer than at present. It does look like the Post Teaser plugin you suggested will do the job, but probably best to experiment with it first on another less-public WordPress blog. Another ‘Real Soon Now’ item, anyway.

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