This post sure has a lot of verbiage for a so-called ‘pictorial’ history! Oh well… too late to change it now. I thought it’d be fun to capture pictures of the site’s past themes, while I can still find examples. This might well only be interesting to me (like people with photos of their children, I guess). Deal with it!

June 2006

Here we have the first blog theme I did. Like all my themes, I started out with a theme I found on the net, and modified it.

I remember completely changing the way the theme was put together, in terms of the CSS, because so many people had trouble rendering the three columns properly. Finally, I gave up on CSS, and actually went to a table-based layout. *shiver* Going to tables meant that the left sidebar comes first in the html file, which supposedly makes it harder for search engines to tell what your page is about (because they give more importance to the “top” of the file).

November 2006

By November, the situation here at Move the Markets had changed quite a bit. I was getting regular submissions from Zoomie, and someone named ExEngineer was coming on board (wonder what happened to him?). I was also getting a lot of comments making it obvious that people were unaware that more than one person wrote on the site. So, I wanted a layout that:

• Made it more obvious that there were multiple authors.
• Better displayed more posts per day.
• Looked different… I was tired of the old look.

Again, starting from an existing multi-author theme, I created this:

I think it’s funny to this day that the graphic at the top (which I created out of flames and shattered glass and a few effects in Corel Painter) has nothing whatsoever to do with finance or stocks. No one ever commented on that, though.

So, the 2-column format allowed me to go back to CSS and still have the page content “first” in the html. After the first couple posts (displayed in wordpress’ horrid summary form), I presented only post titles. This way, many more posts could be easily browsed from the home page. In some ways, this should have been the perfect site layout… but I just never really enjoyed it.

So…

January 2007

By January, I was tired of all the bright orange colors and fancy web-2.0-ish icons beside everything. I set out to design a much more austere theme. Some of you may recall that my first attempt was in muted lavender/purple tones. It was unusual, but I kind-of like unusual. However, so many people complained that I changed it to stronger reds+grays the next day.

I think I got what I wanted, at the time. It was plain, simple, and to the point. This was also when I introduced tagging to posts, and the resultant tag cloud and “related posts” features.

August 2007

While the previous design was very successful, it was time for a change.

• It always bothered me that it rendered slightly differently on IE vs Firefox.
• Sometimes I wrote long articles that looked ridiculous in that little fixed-width column.
• I had been looking at that design for 7 months.
• I got a request to accomodate Firefox-style text scaling, and I would rather undergo serious dental work than try to adjust the CSS for a multi-column blog.

So, this time I thought… What can I do that I don’t see any other bloggers doing?… widgets and web-2.0 tie-ins are all the rage… sometimes I go to a blog and there’s so much stuff there that my eyes have trouble locking on to the actual content. That’s not an exaggeration.

I drew a line in the sand… 1 column! All content, no spectacle! Then, the question became: how to somehow still retain what is useful in all that sidebar stuff? The answer is not yet clear… it will be interesting to see what evolves out of this, and how far that will go until the next re-design. :-)

Update: April 2008

Having gotten tired of the 1-column layout, and having jettisoned the guest authors on the blog, I thought it might be fun to go to a more standard setup. There is a lot to be said about having a “normal” blog theme. How long will it last? Time will tell…

This is the theme I’ve modified the least prior to going live. I changed so little that I even left the link to the original theme’s author in the footer.

I’m going to be changing the site layout today. I’ll start in a few minutes, actually. I’ve already changed over I Am Richard. The new layout is very minimal. I’m taking all these multi-sidebar multi-widget blogs as a contrary indicator. :-)

I’m sure some of you will like it and some of you won’t. That’s just the way it goes. Take comfort in the fact that I’ll probably get bored in another 6 months and change the layout again.

As with every time I change the layout, some things will be broken for a few hours while I check things out. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to comment (once commenting works, anyway). Don’t feel bad if I don’t make every change you request, though…

I’ve adjusted the nightly scan for stocks that may make new 30-Day highs or 30-Day lows (which you can see on my scans page). The list was just too damn big every night. So, last night I thought for a minute about which entries I tend to disqualify right off. I thought of two criteria, which I adjusted:

• Upped the avg volume to 450k from 250k. I was usually automatically passing on stocks doing 200k on the day they show up in the scan, anyway.
• Demanded that the stock’s total range over the last 20 days to be at least 6%. I may raise this further in the future. The idea of the scan is to find stocks taking a rest during a good move. Too many scan candidates had been on the right side of their moving averages, but still essentially moving sideways.

Last night, that cut the scan down to about 2/3rds its normal size. A nice improvement. Tonight the list looks better as well, and I’ve posted the new version. It will be the version I use going forward, as well.

Jaiku Updates

I’m not promising to do this in any timely fashion, but most days I plan to make an entry on my jaiku stream pointing out which of my scan candidates I plan to focus on that day. I’ve been making the entry usually before the markets. Other traders on jaiku are also posting their candidates. It’s really great… check it out if you haven’t!

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.

Since I got a request for one, I’ve put together an RSS feed of the market scans I publish here. You can subscribe to it at this location. The link is also on the scans pages themselves. Let me know if you have any problems with it… it’s kinda hacked together but it does validate, and works for me in google’s feed reeder.

From now on, all the scans I post will be on pages that I update in-place. They are available through the “Stock Market Scans” button at the top of the page. The scan pages can be bookmarked and checked at will. Also, I’m trying to stop producing repetitive posts that no one will want to read a week from now. This way, the scans are taken out of the stream of the normal blog posts.

I’ve added two blogs to my Blogs I Read page above. I browse a ton more blogs, but these are the ones I enjoy the most.

I frankly thought I had added Wall St. Warrior Trader Jaime to my list a while back, but it looks like I didn’t. If you don’t yet read it, just look at today’s trade of the day on Continental Airlines (NYSE: CAL), and you’ll be hooked forever (and probably insanely jealous). You also get pre-market ideas, responses to chart-reading requests, and other helpful articles as well.

Though it may not be the most family-friendly trading blog on the net, I’ve been reading Tale of the Tape for a while now, and I think it needs to get some “blogs I read” respect. You can see trading ideas, interesting charts, trades he made, along with lots of links to interesting articles. Plus, it just seems like the blog has a fun personality to it, if that makes sense.

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
CAL	| |

I’ve been getting feedback on the site, so I’ve made two additions recently: First, you can now subscribe via email. The button is over on the left sidebar with the RSS subscription links. Secondly, I’m imitating Trader Mike and am going to post links that I think are interesting. The last 5 entries will be over on the left sidebar, and you can just view it on del.icio.us as well.

Please keep the suggestions coming… the ones I’ve gotten so far have been good! Thanks, everyone.

If you look up at the bar under the “Move the Markets” title, you’ll see a new button beside the “home” button. It will take you to an annotated list of blogs I read. I read a lot more than this list, but I want to keep the list down to the ones I enjoy the most.  I’m a big fan of books and journals with annotated bibliographies.   So, rather than a bare list, I tried to give a couple sentences about why I enjoy the blog in question. Hopefully it will help you decide whether it’s worth a look.

If you are too lazy to look upward at the links bar, here is the link to the page..

[EDIT: Please go to my software page for the newest version of this plugin]

I wrote my first WordPress Plugin today! It adds a table to the bottom of every post that talks about a stock, with links to their Yahoo, Google, and StockTickr pages. So, for instance, since this post mentions International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM), you should see a table at the bottom with IBM in it. It keys off that parenthetical expression.

Other updates are on the left sidebar… I put a recent comments section, and my StockTickr feed. Also, I think the site renders decently on all common browsers, now. I know there are a few cosmetic glitches if the window is too small, but it’s completely readable now as far as I know. Please let me know if you are having any problems.

If you want to use the plugin, you can download it from this location. Just put it in your wp-content/plugins folder, and activate the plugin. Whenever you mention a stock like so: (Exchange: SYMBOL) in your post for NYSE or Nasdaq, it knows to create links. If you don’t like that format for your posts… you can always put an html comment in the post like <!- - (NYSE: CSX) (Nasdaq: SUNW) - ->, so that part won’t be visible, but the table will still get generated.

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
IBM	| |
CSX	| |
SUNW	| |

So, this is the first step in the new site design. I think it looks attractive. It’s a modified version of a theme I found out on the net. It would be embarrassing to tell you how long I played with the color scheme, before eventually going with the one from the original theme! This morning I’ve discovered that IE6 doesn’t display it quite right if your browser window is too narrow. Browser compatibility issues are really a pain in the neck! I’ll work on that tonight, and sorry if it inconveniences you today.

Well, the markets got off to a strong start this week. Dow still up 139 as I write this. Just about everyone I know is waiting for it to fall back apart…

Edit: I really like the 3 column setup, with resizing content area. I think it’s the “right” thing to do. So, when I noticed IE6 didn’t like my first attempt, I spent a lot of today completely redoing the css for the columns. I used a site I found that claims its code works all the way back to netscape 4. It wasn’t easy to switch it all over, because of the way it wants the divs to overlap. However, now when I go back and try it on IE6 it’s still broken! That’s not fair!

I hope you like the name. I think it’s rather optimistic and catchy.

As you can see, if you were a blogspot reader, I’ve imported that blog in its entirety here. Most of the posts are now categorized. This is already a huge benefit if you are only interested in certain types of posts. I’ve spotted a couple posts where the import didn’t work, and I’m trying to clean those up ASAP.

The look and feel is pretty generic and incomplete at the moment. Over the next few weeks it’ll all get completely revamped. I’m kind of excited to have a database-backed, cgi/servlet enabled web host available to me, as I’ve only been able to host static content in the past. As I get familiar with how that stuff works, the non-blog content should get more exciting.

So, I still have all my old contact methods available, but now you can also contact me like so:

• jabber: richard@movethemarkets.com (googletalk users should be able to contact me via googletalk, though not through the gmail chat interface, it seems)
• email: richard@movethemarkets.com

[EDIT: gmail web-based chat users who want to chat with me must (ONLY ONCE!) add me to their gtalk contact list from another jabber client (such as GoogleTalk or iChat or a multitude of others). Then, once I have accepted the invitation, it looks like the gmail chat interface will understand that it is possible to chat with me. I tried it against my own gmail account, chatting with myself on side-by-side windows.]
My webhost is also a jabber server, so I could conceivably set up a conference (group chat) if enough people want to chat during the trading day. Might be cool, if enough people are interested.