As you may have noticed if you visit regularly, there’s a new design up. It’s pretty similar to the old version. Basically, this is a refresh of the original design, since I liked a lot of the elements in it. One of the most noticeable changes is the absence of a proper sidebar. The purpose for this is that all the important stuff was moved to the bottom of the page in three columns. I wanted to turn my content into two columns, and there just wasn’t room for a sidebar, so I tossed it. The main color has stayed blue, because it’s one of my favorite colors, and it needed to stay that way to stay in line with my branding scheme.
A few other big things is the inclusion of my Tweets in the stream of my blog. I had been planning to do this for a while, but ran into problems using the Action Streams plugin, so I finally decided to write my own script that would fetch my Tweets and stick them into my blog database. It does remove any tweet that begins with an @reply, so as not to clutter things too much. But there is still a problem, I tweet quite a bit more often than I write long-form posts such as this one, so it is very likely that most of my site will be home to my Tweets.
With the redesign, I’m also moving my comments back to an in-house system rather than use Disqus. The migration was pretty simple since, well, no one commented on anything while I was using Disqus. In the future I will be working on the comments to allow people to login using OpenID, Facebook Connect, Friend Connect, and other identity services to authenticate their posts.