I keep getting bored with the look of the site… I changed it all up in January, and now I’m changing it all up again. I’ll try not to break the site as I go, or at least have something stable by Monday.
This time, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.2, which should be transparent to all of you. I switched to a different base theme, and am still making changes to it. The basic ideas this time around are:
- A less busy look.
- You can comment on some pages now, as well as posts (like the one on books, or sites I like, etc)
- You can see the full posts on the front page. I got tired of the abbreviated front-page posts.
- Less ads. Right now, no ads. I’m thinking of making the ads contingent on the length of the posts… they don’t bother me when they’re in a long article, but when someone posts two sentences, it’s almost hard to find them among all the ads.
- Fewer categories, but adding tags. Over the next few days I’m going to drop some categories, but add tags to posts. I’ll put a tag cloud in the sidebar. I think the categories will be:
- Trades: covering trades (duh!)
- Articles: posts about some aspect of trading
- Meta: posts about the blog
- Markets: posts about interesting stocks, and general market observations
- Reviews: a review of a book, website, service, product, etc.
- Performance: week in review, month in review, etc… trading stats
- Misc: everything else
In general, a post will go in one category. Seems simpler. We’ll see… Tags will be where you can browse for posts that touch on certain keywords or topics, regardless of which category they are filed under.
March 3rd, 2007 at 7:57 am
Hey Richard. I’m the same way; always messing with the layout, colors, etc. If I didn’t use Blogger (which sucks), I’d probably tweak stuff at least once a week. Anyway, I really like your new design so far.
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:58 am
i like the new look…btw, buffett said he would be interested in having u as his apprentice if u can get up before 11 am :-)
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 am
@esto: I tried to fight it, but I wanted to upgrade my wordpress, so I thought I might as well go ahead and change everything. I thought the last design was too busy-looking. This one will be much more minimal.
@john: with Buffet money, couldn’t I just pay the sun to stay down until I wake up?
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:50 am
Richard,
I liked the info box that you used to have in the upper right. The new soft-mauve makes some things hard to find. For instance, I’ll generally read an article, post a comment and then subscribe to the comment’s RSS feed. The article looks nice, I love how well the comment box is integrated, but it takes some searching to find the comment subscription entry.
I ended up using the ‘zap colours’ bookmarklet so that the links would stand out properly :(
Maybe it would be a simple matter of using small icons next to your subscription options. With the muted colours, the small splash with the icons would really jump out.
Otherwise I like the navigation and the new look. I wish blogger would offer an ‘advanced’ mode for people to tweak the layouts like this.
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:55 am
Yeah, the contrast is a bit lacking right now… but it’s a work in progress. Thanks for the comments, hopefully I can address most usability issues by Monday. For the rest of today I’ll be focusing on tagging all the entries.
If you’re tired of blogger you could always start posting in washed-out mauve here :-)
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:58 am
Oops, looks like what I thought was the RSS feed for comments turns out to be for the entire site and not just one post. Is there still a way to subscribe to the comments for one post?
And have you viewed your page under Firefox? Your tagline “Stock Market Trading, System Design and Commentary” gets chopped off so I just see a thin, broken line below your banner at the top. (And did you mean to say “_Ignare_ everything we say” in your footer?)
K, enough negativity. Hope there was something constructive buried in there :)
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:03 am
I’ll be adding links for per-post comment rss. It’s always there if you know the URL. Just takes patience until I get to it!
In Camino I’ve been noticing that the tagline is hit and miss on whether it renders. Something I’ll look into later. I’ll be checking it on firefox and IE7 sometime this weekend.
Oops… obviously meant ‘ignore’ will fix that. Thanks!
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:05 am
I type on a dvorak-layout keyboard, so I make typo’s that a lot of people would assume are impossible! The ‘a’ and ‘o’ are next to each other, so it’s very easy to accidentally type ‘ignare’.
When I used to have a day job, I ran into trouble once with the ‘l’ and ‘r’ being next to each other on my keyboard. I asked someone to look at an issue ‘as a whore.’ oops!
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:23 am
richard… site is definitely easier on the eyes. Nice job. Only suggestion would be to add some color at the top… like a banner with the name ‘Move the Markets’ in it.
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:31 am
You use dvorak too? That makes you the third person I’ve met that has tried it, and only the first that keeps it up. It used to drive the office tech support guys crazy whenever I’d come to them with laptop issues. Of course the joke is on me whenever I’d travel and have to use an Internet cafe. It just means that my trip e-mails have an unusual number of ‘m’s and ‘a’s…
Good luck with the rest of the transition.
March 3rd, 2007 at 12:55 pm
I really like it! The disclaimer is great. :)
Is there any word on having some html formatting in our author profile? I’d like to post trading rules, strategy, my current sentiment, maybe a twitter feed, stuff like that. Another idea I had was for me to just do a regular post, and then go back and edit it to update things. I’d like a sticky link to it somewhere, though…
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:12 pm
The whole purple/different shade of purple/white scheme isn’t doing it for me. You need larger text size, darker font color, and a less cluttered feel. Do you blog from your gameboy or what? Make it wider! The content is always good though, just hard on the eyes.
March 3rd, 2007 at 10:02 pm
the secret’s out… I blog from a gameboy. I didn’t think anyone would be smart enough to figure it out, but then mdawsz came along and proved me wrong. wow. i am so impressed.
I used to prefer flowed formatting, but I don’t anymore. Most wordpress themes out there are about this width–it seems to be the standard.
I care about the layout more than the color scheme, which I could easily change every day (”yellow on blue, must be Tuesday,” people would say). Layout is tougher to change up, mostly due to browser compatibility crap.
I would actually like to make several themes, and let the user of the website pick which one they want (a la css zen garden), but I’m not sure how enthusiastic wordpress is about that. I’ll see.
March 4th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Ok, I’ve changed to a color scheme with more contrast… I actually prefer more washed-out colors, but it is harder to spot the links. Whatever, it’s easy to change anytime I get tired of it.
I’ve put a link to the per-post comment RSS feeds (it’s at the top of the comments).
I’ve made the font a little bigger on the posts, but not the sidebar.
I decided I don’t care enough about having a tagline to determine why it’s getting chopped up.
Last time I put any thought into the author profile, I got sidetracked before I got around to implementing anything. Wordpress isn’t aligned with that goal, so I’m going to have to change some stuff up.
I took my twitter feed off the sidebar, because (1) sometimes it dramatically slowed down the page loads, and (2) I’d rather people look at that by joining twitter and befriending me, instead of hitting ‘reload’ on a MtM page constantly.
@Tyro: I started dvorak about 5 years ago because my wrists were starting to hurt on days when I typed a lot. When I had a day job, I was insane enough to alternate dvorak/qwerty every couple days, so I could maintain speed at both. I haven’t kept that up since I’ve been trading, so my qwerty speed has fallen off dramatically.
March 4th, 2007 at 12:57 am
I may put the flash-based twitter plugin back up… since it doesn’t affect the overall page-load like the javascript version did.
March 5th, 2007 at 7:57 am
I like the comment boxes and the easy Comment RSS feed link location. The extra contrast makes it easier to read everything which I also like.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:52 am
@Tyro: thanks, your input was helpful. If you see anything else that bugs you, let me know. I only see one display glitch on IE 7, which is bullet points showing up on the sidebar where they shouldn’t be. Not a high priority problem!
March 5th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
much better -