Tagged: squible

The need for change


I have a very short attention span, I get bored quickly. When I find my self in a completely static, unchanging environment, I get restless. However, I tend to avoid changing but //dangerous or risky// environments.

Take this blog for example (or more generally, my website — which this blog hopes to subsume Very Soon (TM).). There’s nothing particular wrong with the current theme. Or the theme before that, or the one before that. And yet, for the past 2 days I’ve had this incredible desire to try something new. Change things around a bit.

Those helpless souls (I’d be flatterred if there are any) who have nothing better to do than keep refreshing my blog on their browsers might have noticed some funny things happening last evening. I was playing around with the [[http://getk2.com|latest version]] of the now legendary [[http://binarybonsai.com/k2|K2]] theme.

I must say it was very pretty. And I had all but switched to it but for one big problem: it doesn’t play well with my [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/code/wp-dokuwiki|WP-Dokuwiki plugin]] :-( . In any case, I’m now actively tracking that theme. Since this current theme is already a heavily modified version of [[http://squible.com|Squible]], I’ve decided to make a few more changes to incorporate some of the good stuff from K2.

One of the attractions of moving over to K2 was that since its now in SVN, it would have been very easy to merge new changes from upstream. This is currently a nightmare with Squible — when the last update came out, it took me a good few hours of hacking to set things back to normal.

Sometimes this urge for change becomes annoying. But most of the times its fun and I enjoy it.

Show some love to the fuzzy orange icons


You’ll notice some new warm-fuzzy [[http://feedicons.com/|orange icons]] next to the links to the tags. I decided to make it a little easier for people to subscribe to specifc types of content on this blog — so now each tag link has a link to its RSS feed next to it. Thats right, each tag has its own RSS feed.

Here’s a run down of the navigation structure:

* [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/feed/]] — the main site feed
* [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/tags/tagname]] — index page for the tag “tagname”
* [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/tags/tagname/feed/rss2]] — RSS2 feed for the tag “tagname”

Have fun!

New features


This new design has some pretty nice features that I’d like to point out, in case you haven’t noticed them yet:

* **No Google Ads** — lets say I made close to nothing of the few months that I did have the ads going on here. Besides, the quality of the ads was always in question. And less Javascript it always good, right?
* The home page shows just the most recent post by default. There is a lists of previous posts further down. I read at a bunch of places that very long web pages (that you could keep on scrolling forever) are bad at holding attention. Besides, I expect that increasing number of visitors will land on individual posts through RSS feeds. As a good side affect, the home page should load faster.
* [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/archives/|Archives]] — the archives should be very easy to navigate, provide you use a Good ™ browser. You can navigate by date or by tags. Pretty funky, me thinks
* The home page also lists the most recent comments, asides and del.icio.us links
* There is NO sidebar. I was tired of the conventional design, so this is a shot at something new.
* I’m gradually going to fold in all of my static content (at [[http://floatingsun.net]]) into WordPress. The “About” and “Research” sections have already started to come together, so feel free to take a look.

Of course, this is all possible due to the excellent [[http://www.squible.com/squible/|Squible]] theme, WordPress and great plugins, and generous amounts of hacking :-)

Enjoy!