Seasonal Plume

Here is yet another revamp of Seasonal Plume, as I mentioned I was feeling rather disenchanted with my previous layout. This one is cleaner and more streamlined, with the focus back on the content. I’ve also finally upgraded WordPress, which was quite overdue! Some other changes include:

1. I’ve removed the Snippets and Quotes categories. They’re very rarely updated, and they only serve as noise, mostly. In that regard, there are no more aside entries.
2. Twitter! I’ve added my most recent three tweets to my sidebar.
3. All books in the library now lead to the Amazon product page. It was getting increasingly difficult customizing each template for the Now Reading plugin, so I did away with it.

There might be a few quirks in IE7 and IE6, especially the latter. I hope to get to work on them fairly soon — I don’t have a Windows machine or VM yet on my MacBook, hence it will have to wait for a bit. Feel free to let me know if you come across problems!

I finally did a long-overdue update of Seasonal Plume on the website-side: upgraded the installation, a few content updates for the new year (three new progress bars!), plus three new pages: a challenges page (looking rather blank at the moment), the completed 50 books for 2007 challenge, and the 50 books for 2008 challenge tracking page.

Ah, finally it’s done. Just a few days shy of WordPress 2.3, but it’s running on the 2.3 release candidate as I figure it would be easier and faster to upgrade to the stable releases later on, than to keep using 2.2 for the new layout. So here it is, a cleaner, less cluttered, and hopefully faster-loading Seasonal Plume.

I still really like the old layout, but I was starting to look for something easier on the eyes, where the attention is more on what’s written than on how the website looks like (though I’ve had quite a few good reviews of it!). There are a lot of other things I took into consideration with the redesign, but the technical stuff will be food for discussion either at my portfolio or my scripts blog.

What’s “special” about this layout, though, was that everything lines up! It took me a while to get every single element to line up correctly. ;) Also, I took careful consideration of my library section, so that the books are more organized and contain useful information other than just pretty covers. I will be re-tagging all the entries–a side effect of the new tagging features for WP2.3, but as my tags are all over the place, I think that’s fine.

If anything breaks, or if you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me know! I would love to hear them, especially if my blog breaks ;)

I upgraded WordPress, plus did a few modifications to the footer of the website. As much as I’m loving the layout (and still consider it one of my favorites/best), I need to bring down the total file size somehow; might end up just changing the layout. But that’s when I have a bit of time.

‘Been thinking about starting a small (largely personal) writing project here, but that will have to be started when I actually have time. Stay tuned!

Quite a few new things have been added over the past few days, such as the Name Dropper plugin (albeit slightly modified for my uses) for social bookmarking, the DoFollow plugin for disabling the “nofollow” attributes in external comment links, as well as upgrading the Now Reading plugin; I’ve also started using FeedBurner, but you can still access the feed using the old URL (http://seasonalplume.net/feed/).

I’ve also started another “aside” category (like my snippets and website category asides) for book quotes I find that I feel like quoting. Each of the items currently shown on the front page also have proper excerpts now,and I shall continue to write them with the main entries as I go along.

Lastly (and probably only of interest to us geekier readers) if you try viewing the blog without any stylesheet whatsoever, there’s now an explanation plus some important headers for main sections.