Well, sort of. I’m back, anyway.
As most of you know–if any of you are still reading this–I’ve been on a sort of unannounced hiatus since the end of March, largely due to school responsibilities and, well, lack of time. This isn’t to say that I’ve gotten less busy, necessarily, but I have resolved to make writing a bigger part of my life (again) and get back writing some regular material for my own personal blog, right here. I’ll be blogging elsewhere, as well, but I’ll post more on that soon.
You’ll notice that along with the new writing, as usual with me, comes a new design. I have no doubt I’ll be tweaking, modifying and possibly outright changing this template over the coming weeks, but for now I’m happy enough with it to kick this off and present it to the interwebs. By all means, please (please) give me feedback! I’d love to hear what complaints, issues, etc. you might have with it, particularly regarding design and usability. My goal was to place a lot of focus on the content (tada!) while still making archives, links, search, etc. very accessible. You’ll also notice all my links there in the sidebar, with their fancy social-network-color-appropriate hover and everything.
And another thing. You’ll notice I’ve built in Facebook’s new open graph API and Twitter’s @anywhere service into my blog now. This was partly an experiment just so I could learn the basics of the two new APIs, but partly because I’m excited to have them on here. So now, for example, you can hover over my Twitter handle, @alexpriest, and see a hovercard. In addition, you can “like” this post by clicking the button below (so please do!).
Anyway, that’s enough about bloggy-stuff, on to some real opinion/news/ranting soon enough. Mostly on social media and technology–with a little politics and personal life thrown in. Thanks for reading.
May 24, 2010 at 4:30 am
Hey Alex,
I like the redesign! It certainly looks more modern than your previous blog. I look forward to reading some of your future posts. I'm also digging the coordinated social media hover color. One downside: It's very difficult to see the links under Archives and Categories because of the font's color. Perhaps you should opt for something darker.
PS. I'm currently redesigning my own website as well!
May 24, 2010 at 4:49 am
Thanks! I've been back and forth on the text color for the archives and categories. On one hand, you definitely have to look for them (although the hover color for those links is bright red), and that makes them a little difficult to find. But on the other, I kind of like them muted like that, so you don't really see them unless you're looking for them (plus their titles are plenty dark to see).
I dunno–with that rationalization, what do you think?
May 25, 2010 at 3:33 pm
With that rationalization, I think it's fine. Though keep in mind that 1) I didn't think of doing that the first time and 2) people might want to quickly scan for topics, which is very difficult with the light color font… unless they hover their mouse over each link one at a time, but that isn't the best user-friendly thing to do.
Also, when you hover over "blog, about, rss", the hover color isn't as vibrant as your other links, which is strange because those 3 links seem to be the most important.
If I had to change either the muted link colors or the "blog/about/rss" hover effect, I would definitely at least change the latter.
Get a few more opinions and see what others think!