The design you’re now looking at was developed in late-January/early-February and I’ve been waiting to get a chance to implement it. Unfortunately, that chance never came so decided this morning to Just Do It™.

The previous design had been built from basic evolutionary changes to a design I created back way back in 2001 using HTML4 & tables (yuck!) and had recently become more of a sandbox for testing than anything else. My goals with this new design were to slim down the XHTML & CSS, to simplify the site, to take the two-tone color palette a little more grayscale, and to focus a lot more on the typography.

I’m sure I still have a few CSS tweaks here and there and probably some fixes to the Textpattern pages & forms, but this is what it will generally look like. I hope you like it!

It’s been exactly six months and a day since Textpattern 4.0.4 was released. I don’t know what took me so long, but I finally upgraded my installation this morning and it was perfectly smoothly, as always¹.

In the process, I’ve started upgrading some of my installed plug-ins to those that support, and take full advantage of, Textpattern 4.0.4. I especially like that tru_tags has, “Added some fancy javascript tricks and UI enhancements to make admin-side tagging easier.” Way cool!

I look forward to taking advantage of some of the new plug-in functionality and using some of the other great new plug-ins that have been cropping up recently. You’ll probably see some new features popping up around here soon.

On a related note, I have also now personally qualified both mta_article_id and mta_digg_it for Textpattern 4.0.4 (although I already knew they worked).

¹ The Textpattern team does an especially good job with keeping major upgrades seamless.

I apologize for the mess in article headers over the last couple days. I’ve been restyling them, but only have a few hours in the mornings to do so and have been taking my sweet time to finish them up.

Update: This has been cleaned up. Thanks for your patience.

I’ve added a new supplemental content block to the bottom of this page (and will eventually be added to other pages) which currently contains my Required Reading list (i.e. my blogroll). The sites listed there are the most important or most useful out of all my syndicated subscriptions and I’ll be keeping it up to date. It’s also sorted by my current preference.

I have multiple reasons for doing this: 1) to give a little context to the site (what I’m reading), 2) to link to the sites that I feel deserve the traffic, and 3) as a marketing ploy (hopefully, somehow, it’ll come back around).

The design is something that I’ve been working on for a little while now, but I think it’s ready to be released into the wild. I don’t think that it’s quite complete as it’s a little tricky to implement in CSS and I think it needs a few other tweaks here and there.

Also, there’s currently an unimplemented piece of the supplemental content section labeled “Something Else”. I’m taking suggestions as what would be most useful there. There are some implementation considerations, so I may rule out some suggestions for those reasons, but please do comment with your ideas.

Update: I’ve also tweaked the article title font and how its underlining works. I just really liked the way I had implemented it in the supplemental content and I was never happy with the titles anyway.

I’ve had a longer post pending for a couple weeks now regarding the Technorati and tagging support I’ve added to this site (an experiment for the Technorati & tagging support I added to Barkings—the Small Dog Electronics weblog), but I’ve been working too much to finish it and the many other pending posts and articles. Long story short: I’m using the tru_tags Textpattern plug-in (thanks Jon!) and I love it. It really does add a nice dimension to the browsing experience, especially since I don’t really use categories extensively.

Continuing: I’ve updated the typography a little bit and added my new logo. I will keep tweaking the layout as time goes on, but very slowly and I doubt I’ll stray much from this design (I haven’t even wandered that far from my original design).

I’m currently completing some very ugly work on the SmallDog.com and PodJungle.com shopping cart. Overall goal being to bring more standards compliance, easier layout tweaking by the Marketing Team, and slightly improved customer experience. I have to admit I’m not too impressed with our development process at the moment, but I’m too swamped with other projects to make the necessary changes.

And now, back to work for me…

As the Easter holiday is over, I’ve switched out the billboard to what I had originally planned to launch with: the intro to Operation Ivy’s Room Without a Window. The lyrics and energy of Operation Ivy will forever leave its imprint on my soul.

While I’m checking things off my list (it’s a weekend), I’ve added another new feature: the billboard.

The billboard will feature quotes, pictures, or any other random and important content that would require a big spot at the top of the main page. Who knows where it’ll take me.

To start it off, a quote from the brilliant British stand-up comedian and actor Eddie Izzard. Emily figured it was a perfect day and quote to start with. (Chocolate bunny picture courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net)