Carol of the Bells Version 8 Launched

Carol of the Bells Version 8 is here. A bit of background: this has been sitting on my computer, more or less finished, for almost two months. I completed roughly 80-90% of it in one week (the entire design, sans-features), and… left it there. I’m sorry it took this long to push it out (I’ve been using it as my default for this site since that time), as it really is much improved over the last version. How? Glad you asked…

1. Header-less design

   I think this is the most striking feature of this design at first sight. To be honest, I’m just growing tired of websites having big, irrelevant banners/headers at the top of every single page. The worst part is it never changes, either, it’s always the same static thing that you have to scroll past in order to get to the reason you came to the website in the first place. It’s just become a personal peeve of mine lately. Really, if you’re reading this I’m lucky to have you on my blog at all, don’t need to make the experience any harder for you. :lol

2. Smilies are fully functional

   When I launched last year, I hacked in a set of smilies I liked over the default WordPress ones. However, it only worked for a small amount of smilies, the rest were either broken images or not parsed at all. With this release, all the “old Fusetalk” smilies from Project Gforum, plus the Neogaf laughing smiley, work in both my entries and in the comments.

3. Fading Javascript “magic”

   Small, but it cuts the little clutter there is and lets you focus on content, and you know the saying: “content is king.” Even the little copyright notice fades in and out if you hover over the logo in the bottom right. I didn’t make the logo itself disappear because I wanted a little watermark on my content, kind of like what YouTube videos have. Plus I think it’s important for the blog’s name to be visible somewhere, and since it’s been minimized and shrunk down this version, that means you always get to see it.

4. Thinner content column

   While this means there might be a bit more scrolling once in the content, I think eliminating the header allowed for this. I made this column thinner because more blogs, in general, have thin (sometimes exceedingly so) content columns, and I wanted my blog to, you know, look like a blog. At least a little. Plus I think on higher-res monitors that my old design had your eyes going left and right for too long, which can be disorienting and tiring.

5. Upcoming public/private split

   I went over this in my last entry (which you can also go to by going to the bottom of this page now), but I wanted to push this out since it was stable and I wanted more people to use it. The split will happen in the future whenever I get the time and motivation, but it’s all the more reason to register now.

6. Renewed focus on comments

   Comments are taking a step forward this version as I make more of an effort to cultivate a kind of community I can interact with here. For me, comments, even short and infrequent ones, are really really big incentives to update. To make comment threads easier to follow, you can now directly subscribe to individual comment feeds via RSS. Registering, logging in, and editing your settings/info are also easier than ever now. Finally, due to spammers, comments are closed on entries older than 62 days, but based on feedback I may extend that, even though it’s been pretty effective so far.

There are also some miscellaneous upgrades (you can now see what HTML tags you can use in comments above the comment box, there are only four entries per page to speed page loads, my comments are now highlighted, entry tags are no longer hidden, rollover text is everywhere, and some others), but if you’ve been around long enough I’m sure you’ll notice them. More than any of my other designs, I had viewers and commentators at the forefront of my mind when creating this one. I think it’s going to do a good enough job, what about you?
-Andrew