A little while back WordPress released their 2.7 version of the blog engine. Much of what was changed involved the administrator panel and didn’t impact the blog reader at all. However, there was one change that I wanted to incorporate here, but couldn’t until I got a new theme that supported the new features.
So here’s the new theme, obviously with a little bit of a new look to the blog. The new feature that I want to note is that you can now reply directly to comments made by other folks and your comment will be nested under theirs. Its officially known as threaded comments and should help the flow of any back and forth conversations that may crop up between readers. I’m thinking Steven and Lars since they seem to be the only people that read and comment regularly. I see it as a good way to promote interaction between people on the site.
The other thing I’m going to try out is…honestly, I’m not sure what its called. I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t know it off the top of my head. Anyway, I’m going to try out breaking up posts on the main page into “preview sections” with links to the full post on an individual post page. I’m not sure if this is going to work out to be a good or bad change. Some people may find it annoying, while some my find it allows them to see more of the older posts they may find interesting when they go to the homepage. Also, it will allow them to read a little bit of the post and decide if they want to actually read on or not.
So there you have it. Since this new theme is a little more complicated than my last, I would greatly appreciate any feedback you might have regarding things you don’t necessarily like or bugs that you might find. I also don’t think I’m completely settled on what I have yet. I still think it could use a little more punch aesthetically, so don’t be surprised if things continue to change a little bit here and there. And definitely let me know if the “preview section” method is annoying or not.
I read regularly…I just don’t comment. For what it’s worth, I get annoyed by only having the preview sections b/c I use an RSS reader and that means I have to open up a new window to get to the whole post. That’s my too sense.
LOVE the new look! Is it hard to use a layout like this that isn’t directly from the 15 that WordPress offers? And just out of curiosity, what is a “Green Site,” in terms of a blog?
Um, so answering your first questions isn’t as simple as one would think. My site is a personally hosted site, i.e. not at WordPress.com, so I can use pretty much whatever theme I want. It looks like to me, your site is hosted as WordPress.com so you’re limited to using only the themes they have provided. If you were to get a personally hosted site using a stand alone install from WordPress.org, you could use whatever theme you wanted and you could make it as simple or complicated as you want. If you have any interest in doing that, I could try to help you out with it. Its really not the most complicated thing to do, and it gives you a lot of control over options available to you.
If you click on the “Green Site” picture it will tell you all about it, but essentially my webhost is a carbon neutral company and they promote that by offering their hostees to put those pictures on their sites.
Swanky, dude.
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