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Tag: blog

Blogging: New blog design v5?

February 24, 2009
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Well, this at least the 4th major redesign this blog has had (previous ones being: January 2005, August 2003, June 2003) and it’s the one I’ve spent least amount of time on, but looks the nicest in my opinion.

I’m using a combination of TheBuckMaker’s Aerodrome theme with the WPTouch iPhone theme providing the iPhone theming (with the compatibility being checked by using the How to emulate iPhone (Change user agent) in Safari and Firefox tips for testing on the desktop). I’m also utilising the Twitter for WordPress plugin to pull my @rchiswell twitter feed and SEO No Duplicate for search engine canonical links. I’m also using the WordPress plugins WP-PageNavi, Trackback Validator, Sociable and Chris Black’s digg widget.

Hopefully, not only has it provided easier access to the rest of my online presence, but it has also made the site a lot easier on the eye and helps you access the information you came here for quicker and easier (although feel free to read any of my ramblings which takes your fancy).

Blogging: Redesign completed

January 9, 2005
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Blog view on 9th Jan 2005Well, I’ve now finished the redesign of my blog (I think it’s the 3rd redesign so far) . It makes use of PHP, Javascript and CSS – and looks best in Mozilla Firefox (the little “date tabs”/”comments left” etc have rounded corners in Firefox instead of just being square tabs). The HTML (at least of the index page) validates and the CSS nearly validates (just the -moz specific attributes fail the validation – the W3C CSS validator should skip over ‘vendor specific tags’).

I’ve now reinstalled MT Refsearch (which performs a search on the site if a visitor comes from a major search engine), CacheRemote (to cache my blogroll: I did want to get it working with Gravatar – but they seem to be having DNS issues at the moment), MT Blacklist (to help block out spam), MT Macro (for the little smilies and Amazon links), and finally Neil Turner’s PHP TypeKey system.

Now just to get another site designed….

Blogging: New Look – Implemented

August 11, 2003
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Well, the redesign to Richy’s Random Ramblings is now up and active! What do you think?

Apart from the CSS and HTML changes (including making the content come before the HTML and getting the CSS and HTML to validate), I’ve also made a number of back end changes so the system should “slide” onto the new server without problems (there’s a change of directory structure from “Richy’s Personal Preference” to “Cpanel’s enforced Preference”: and it’s a lot easier for me to work around Cpanel then vice versa).

I’ve only updated the index template and the individual entry templates so far: all the category/archive ones are currently corrupted until I get around to them – but let me know if you spot any problems so I can address them now (leaving details of which browser you are using is helpful as well!).

Blogging: New Look

August 11, 2003
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New Look for Richy's Random RamblingsWell, to coincide with the move to the new server, I’ve decided to give Richy’s Random Ramblings a whole new look: on the left you’ll find a clickable image which will load the full 70Kb screenshot I’ve taken of the new look site?

Do you like it? Any comments would be appreciated as I’m not really much of a designer? If it’s all ok – I’ll try and make it go live next weekend (along with all the other sites!). The design is very very loosely based on Neil’s templates and Glist’s 3 column CSS, but with my own brand of code 😉

Blog: Squash, Squish That Blog

June 16, 2003
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SquashYou may have noticed a very slight change in the look of Richy’s Random Ramblings today: that’s because I’ve been doing some “behind the scenes tinkering” to get the page to load a bit faster (all the graphics, CSS and Javascript now come down to a total of 40Kb: down from nearly 48Kb).

How did I do the file size reduction? Well, apart from removing the calendar (as Neil noticed, it does add a hefty lump to the HTML mark up and doesn’t really add anything to the page), I’ve also dumped Overlib (which I was using before) and decided to go using the “W3C” recommended “acronym tag”. I hadn’t really thought about using it before as I was worried about “how will people know that they can mouse-over to get details” – but then I came across this entry and it reminded me of the magic of CSS… So I’m using that instead and may even add a few more acronym explanations as I go on (once I stop typing acronymn instead of acronym). That alone allowed me to dump a large portion of my Javascript file!

Why the reduction? Hmm – I just felt pity for “narrowband” (modem) users, that’s all. It’s nowt to do with disc space (I’ve got 20Gb) or bandwidth (I’ve currently got 40Gb/month allocation and I’m seriously considering going for a 700Gb/month option as it’s cheaper(!)), but just fancied a little bit of “play code editing” instead of the serious code editing stuff.