Just like last year this site has gone Pink for October. I’d like to introduce you to Cherry the new flavour for this blog. With Cherry things around here have changed a fair bit. This flavour was a long time coming and I haven’t updated the site with my usual flavour a season until this one. This is based on the design I’ve made for the Pink for October site and I plan in the next week or so to release a Wordpress theme based on this format.

No way is this just a realign

Cherry not only sees a new format but it also sees me cementing a lot of fragmented parts of this site. I’m going to break down each bit in summary here to let you see the changes.

• Expresso: This is now a tumblr blog and linked at the top of this site. I plan to ‘try’ and focus around design but it may well potter about a bit from that theme. I’m linking in my del.icio.us feeds into this along with flickr. So far it’s a collection of quotes, short thoughts, videos, images and links I’ve found on my travels around the web.
• About page: There is now a revamped about page which has flickr, twitter and last fm feeds in it. I’m making this a more personal part of the site in linking profile stuff from around the web into this page. It’s not a life stream which at one point was intended - it’s more of a life sketchbook if you will.
• Inspiration : I’ve been running a flickr group for webspiration and colourspiration now for a while. I also am a collector of links as I’ve said in the past my bookmarks make some insomnia curing reading there are that many. I’m slowly moving these onto del.icio.us and this inspiration page will be showing a few selected categories (some are to be filled up so check back). I’ve also linked in the latest from the flickr groups I run. I’m no longer going to be having a webspiration category on this site. I want to move this into full roast a bit more, so this page serves as a one stop quick inspiration shot.
• Category focus: With the tumblr becoming the espresso I’m bring the focus onto full roast and house blend. Before the lines sometimes blurred a bit. I’ve moved to only show the latest 2 posts from these 2 categories on the front of the site.
• Tag cloud: As part of this move I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3 and the tag feature it now has. The conversion of my tags from ultimate tag warrior went well - the move itself was relatively painless apart from one loop confusion. This cloud is present on most pages and can be used as an alternative method of finding information on this blog. I’ve always liked tag clouds and thought a bit about how to get one on all pages without it being messy. I’ve got a bit of tidying up to do on this tag cloud so will be doing that and making sure all posts have tags over the next week. I hope you enjoy it as a method of finding things on the site.

Before anyone else says it yes it’s wide

I figure I will broach this subject before anyone says it. I have always been vocal about my stance on 900+ sites. Times change but my stance was always a personal gauge of 3% of users - if the figure for those viewing my site went below 3% I’d considering widening my site. It dropped in spring and I have had a fair few thoughts about whether I should do this or not. In the end I have opted to. Of course, the age old argument it’s not the resolution but how wide you have the browser comes to mind. With this 2 column design the site is no unusable in lower resolutions so I feel I’m covering my bases a bit. Times change and it felt right for my site to go wide with this flavour. I was able to accomplish a lot of what I wanted by going this wide and feel happy about my choice.

Flavours RIP temporarily

As everything has changed so much for now it is goodbye to flavours for at least this month. As this is done in part for Pink for October I feel this is a good choice. Along with this, a lot of the older flavours were just breaking and had sections that bore no relevance to what is now on the site. I am not ruling back bringing the flavour switcher back though. I do want to keep more up to date even if it’s realign flavour, so I will be working on more flavours.

Long time coming but happy?

I feel really happy about this theme. It’s odd I was feeling very constrained by not only the old flavours and their various flaws that got worse the more site changes I made, but with the coconut flavour layout. It seemed like this site was stuck in a vortex and with Cherry I feel it’s broken free and I feel a lot more renewed about posting - the strange new design effect. I hope you all like it as for once I’m relatively happy (it does happen sometimes) with this theme. Whilst I may be dropping the pink I want to continue on this basis and feel I may have found a happy format for all the variety of content I have on this site.