Version 9

This is it, Version 9 of this blog is officially a go!

This is actually the third iteration of Version 9 since I launched Version 8 in early 2010. Fascinating, huh? I originally wanted it to resemble a more traditional blog, with a header and sidebar. But that got kinda sidetracked when I got the idea for this theme yesterday. Yeah, this is actually one of my fastest idea → implementations ever, and probably one of my best designs too. This design uses a few visual trends that have gotten my interest lately, such as a noisy background, responsive design, nonstandard heading font (courtesy Google), text shadow as a glow effect, and a thick footer. Oh and of course the +1 button, because why not?

This design also evolves my last design in a few ways. Like the old one, it’s headerless, with nothing in between the top of the page and the content, and it also thins up the content column, like the last design did to the one before it. You may have also noticed that there’s only one post per page; this is due to an observation of how this blog is read, and also how I update it. Posts tend to be quite long, and they’re usually only made about twice a month.

This version is more than just the design, though. It’s sort of a rebranding. You may have noticed there’s no mention in the design or title of this post to Carol of the Bells, this blog’s old name. It’s true, I’m retiring that old moniker, so formally, this is the end of Carol of the Bells. Intrinsically though, it’s the exact same blog. Carol of the Bells has been a great name these past six years (!!), I just felt it was finally time to move on.

If you take all the changes to this blog and make them happen at once, you could say this is a completely different blog than the one I started in June 2005. It’s at a different URL, on a different platform, and now has a completely different name. But, really, it’s exactly the same as it always was. The thing is, none of those things matter next to the content. And the content has always been pretty much the same, serving up my thoughts on a variety of topics in an almost introspective voice.

There are also some invisible changes in the pipe. I’ve already made some of my older posts private, like the old old 2005 ones were, and this is in preparation to make this blog finally visible to search engines for the first time ever, and I’m planning to have the comments and comment form visible on the front page. I also had this grand idea to turn this into more than just a blog, and make it an all-in-one portfolio/blog/social hub of everything I do, but now I think that’s unnecessary. This has always been a blog, and that’s what it’s good at.

Always interested in feedback on my designs and ideas.
-Andrew