More Blog Updates

I’ve gone through another round of tweaks to the blog and thought I’d share again.

New Theme

I switched the site to using the excellent CopyBlogger theme that was done by Chris Pearson and generously donated to the world by CopyBlogger. In terms of design I love clean and this is about as clean as it gets. There are advantages and disadvantages to using a free WordPress template for you blog. The advantages are that you get an excellent design and it’s free. The disadvantages are that there will be other sites out there using the same design and you can’t build a unique visual identity.

I can’t imagine that I’ll run the CopyBlogger theme for ever but for now I think it’s a fair compromise. I do hope to make some minor modifications to the design in the short run. I should probably come up with a header image too. Eventually I’m sure I’ll want to go custom here but since I’m not much of a designer I’ll have to hire that out and don’t want to take that step just yet.

ShareThis

I switched from using FeedBurner’s feed flare to using ShareThis at the bottom of each post. ShareThis is super easy to add and provides users the ability to e-mail a post as well as submit it to all the relevant social bookmarking sites. For some reason I’ve become a fan of Mixx rather than Digg (I think I prefer getting into Mixx now while it’s smaller than joining the huge Digg) and so it seems like a good idea to provide readers with a way to submit to Mixx as well as the others.

FeedBurner’s feed flare is still on the RSS feed. Whis is kind of redundant now but I’m not horribly enamored with the way that ShareThis appears on the feed. I’m pretty sure I can change it but need to look into it some more.

By the way, you should take this as a hint that I’d like my readers to submit my posts to social networking sites.

PhotoDropper

Like I said I’m not much of a designer and don’t think enough about the visual appeal of my sites. But a few days ago I was looking at this blog and realized the big mass of unbroken text was rather daunting. Co-incidentally I read about the new PhotoDropper plugin which lets you easily add Flickr photos that are released under Creative Commons license to your posts. Now I’m making an effort to add photos to most posts.

While it’s sometimes quite a bit of work I find it’s also quite a bit of fun. Since many of my posts deal more with abstract thoughts it’s often hard to find appropriate images that relate to the text some some images are just loosely related and some I chose just for the emotional response they evoke. I really think it adds a lot to the blog and if you blog I’d suggest giving the plugin (or at least the technique) a try.

Ooops

I had accidentally set WordPress to require registration to leave comments. I’ve changed that so you should feel free to comment away.