I’ve had this designed stored away for well over six months. I’ve finally managed to get it released to the web.

I’m currently doing a live redesign on Dontcom. What this means is that the site will constantly be changing. Things are totally not polished right now so please bear with me as I tweak things up. Also, this means I’d love to have your feedback on the layout/functionality. I’ve tested in Safari and Firefox - so if there are any IE visitors (Dave) could you let me know how it looks.

If you’re reading this from a feed reader please take a moment to jump out of RSS land and have a look at the new design.

So I just discovered a highly annoying new ‘feature’ in Wordpress 2.1. If you use the <- - more - - > tag in your posts (as I do) it will also truncate the post in your RSS feed.

Arse!

Anyway - thanks to a very smart blogger I now have a plugin that resolves the issue. So for those of you who are RSS centric, sorry about that previous post (there is more to it, so please click through). I’ve installed the plugin so hopefully you’ll be having the full sized posts in your favorite RSS reader.

Happy days are here again!

Since launching the new look at the beginning of the week I’ve been quietly adding in some features that I’ve wanted for a while. Just ’cause I’m posting about it now doesn’t mean I’m going to stop adding/tweaking…I’m just going to take a little rest and work on other projects that need my attention. Then I’m going to come back here and funk it all up with more. Yes MORE!

So here you have a list (albeit a short one) of the changes so far:

• Fixed the double posts on the home page. The lead post was being repeated in the list of recent posts under the photos section. Not good. But fixed now thanks to this Wordpress forum post.
• Added support for Gravatars on the comments section
• Added Gravatar Signup checkbox to the comment form
• Added support for Technorati tags. I’m still setting this up as I’m unsure where and what I want to do with them
• I reskinned the Wordpress admin with the ‘Tiger’ admin theme. You cant see it - but I can and it rules!

I know there are some of you who only use RSS to read this site…and thats fine. But now its time to crawl out of the RSS hole you live in and experience this site through a browser (preferably Firefox - but it’ll work in anything).

There are quite few reasons for the new look - the main one being I was sick of the old one. Here are some other factors:

• I discovered Josef Muller-Brockman and had to try out the giant sans-serif thing.
• My wordpress install was hacked to bits so I couldn’t upgrade. I started on a fresh install with a fresh look.
• My old host totally sucked so i switched to a new local host that I’m totally totally stoked with (Thanks for all the work, Quintin).
• Now that delicious automatically posts my daily links to this blog I wanted a way to separate them from the rest of the posts. This design achieves that.
• I wanted to use a weighted category list to give the user an at-a-glance idea of what this website is about.

So here you have it - the all new dontcom.com. It’s written in strict semantic XHTML1.0 and CSS2/CSS3. It is as accessible as I could get it without testing - so if you notice anything weird please let me know.

There are a million other things I’d like to ad and tweak and as time goes by you may notice things tightening up a little.

Oh - and one last thing before I go - happy Winter Solstice New Zealand!

I’ve spent the last couple days upgrading to an unsupported ver of WordPress. You can see the full version information in the footer.

The biggest change I’ve noticed (other than numerous UI tweaks) is the way it handles the templates. It’s no longer just one index.php file in the root of the WordPress install - there is now an entire template directory structure and accompanying admin interface. There was talk of the upgrade script for porting one’s current template over to the new system but this feature didn’t seem to work for me.

If you are thinking about using WordPress I would suggest you get the latest nightly build rather than the stable ver, as you’ll just have learn the new templating method anyway.

So far I’m most pleased with WordPress 1.5. It took a bit of a kick start, but its now chugging along just fine, thank you!

By the way - Merry New Year.