Shane Life

I’m looking forward to installing the newest version of the best blogging software in the world. One huge area that I’m looking forward to seeing is the new Happy Cog-redesigned administrative view. The preliminary screenshots I’ve seen look great and I’ve always felt that this was a place that Wordpress could really improve.

I imagine that upgrading could potentially break my theme, so I’ll wait until I have some time to troubleshoot, but it will be fun to play around with. What may end up happening is if I have enough fun with it, I’ll end up rocking another re-design of this blog. But work will have to calm down, both 8-5 and 7-11.

You’ll just have to wait and see…

OK, so I heard something that bummed me out. The current design of this site does not work in IE 7. BLECH.

So, I’m going to be doing some tweaking. Bear with me. I doubt it will be anytime soon before I jump into creating an actual theme like the one in my previous post, but we’ll see.

OK, so I was all set to get my blog moved over to a more lightweight theme, considering modding the Indigo theme by Kaushal Sheth. I got it working, but there was something wacky going on with the sidebar widgets and I didn’t really want to mess with all the work of trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but I have yet to find a theme that works better than K2.

I did remove the Flickr photos from the sidebar, although I doubt anyone noticed. Content soon. I also have an update on the weight loss (thought I forgot, didn’t you?).

So I think that I get tired with blog designs easily because I am starting to tire of the all orange action that I’ve got going on here. I like it, but not TOO much. I sense a redesign coming in the future, but I’m likely still going to incorporate the random movie quotes into the header (aren’t those sweet?).

I want some user interaction for my next design and I also want to know what content you prefer on the old bloggy blog.

First question: What should be the predominant color on my new blog design?

1. Blue
2. Red
3. Green
4. Black
5. Other

Second question: Is there content that does not exist that you would like to see, or content that you would like to see more or less of?

Third question: Would you like to see me add a movie review sidebar? (I found a sweet plugin that will allow me to do really quick, on-the-fly movie reviews.)

So…it’s up to you…

I’m messing with the style of my site…sorry for the boring-ness right now. Give it time. It will be totally sweet. I’m going to go with a variation on danish designer Joen Asmussen’s theme Fauna.

As I continue to get more familiar with CSS and XHTML, I’m planning on using this site as a testing grounds for layouts, etc. so don’t be surprised if it changes (but also don’t be surprised if it doesn’t change…)

Let me know what you think of the design. Blogger doesn’t give you huge amounts of customization and once I move to a hosted service, I’ll likely use Moveable Type, but for now…this was relatively painless and FREE.

I tried to make my changes without a little help from my friends (could you imagine if the Beatles would have called their song that?), but at 1:00am I stopped being effective. Kevin at graphicPUSH helped me find a little div that was hanging out in the middle of my code.

I feel better because it finally feels a little more like my own site…my banner, my background, my color scheme. I also would be remiss if I didn’t thank Douglas Bowman at Stopdesign for the initial template.

Let me know what you think of it….