I’ve put together a new site design. I’ve been wanting to make something light and clean-looking for a while, and with my brother away at camp, I’ve had a lot of free, undistracted time to work on it.
It’s very much inspired by the default Tumblr theme. When I first saw that, I loved the clean, spacious look of the site, and I wanted to have something like it. So, yesterday and today I spent several hours modifying the default Wordpress theme.
The other cool thing is this new theme supports Wordpress Widgets, which make customizing the sidebar incredibly easy.
The icons are from the Silk collection at FamFamFam.com. This was also an opportunity for me to play with the Yahoo Grid, which made developing this theme much easier.
Let me know if anything looks out of place or if you see any errors. I’ve looked over everything over and over again, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t missed something.
Hope you like it!
I’m updating the blog to the latest version of Wordpress. Things may get wonky. Cross your fingers.
UPDATE: I think we’re good. The upgrade is complete. Let me know if something is broken.
This is a clock that I got from the Chamber of Commerce.
Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless
I just wanted to make sure everyone knows about this: In my sidebar, there’s a feed of interesting stories that I’ve found around the internet. I get these from Google Reader; underneath each story in Google Reader there’s a “share” button that adds the story to the feed.
There’s also an RSS feed for this list of shared stories that you can subscribe to in Bloglines, Google Reader, or your favorite RSS client. It’s located here.
I update this way more often than I do the big blog, so if you’re looking for interesting content, that’s the place you’ll want to go.
I’ve upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.1. Let me know if anything looks out of the ordinary.
The only noticeable problem I’ve fond so far is that WP 2.1 broke my blogroll. I was using a customized bit of PHP to make my blogroll display just right. Now it’s throwing me a SQL error. It’s probably something simple, but I’m too tired to figure it out right now. So I’ve disabled the blogroll for now.
I may decide to just leave it. The Google Reader section of my sidebar lets me share the most interesting posts from people that I read. That way I don’t have to prune my blogroll for dead blogs. If you want a link in the sidebar, get me to subscribe to your blog and then write something good. My sidebar would thus only have interesting and up-to-date links. We’ll see.
The good parts: Wordpress feels a lot snappier now. It’s also been automatically saving this post as I’ve been writing it. Other upgrades listed on the Wordpress website.
Update for everyone who cares: I’m definitely dropping my blogroll. Personally, I never use anyone else’s blogrolls any more. I’d rather have the much more dynamic list of recently interesting content from Google Reader.
And considering that you can actually lose Google ranking if you have too many links on your page, it might even help drive traffic to my blog if I take down my blogroll.
I’ve expanded the size of my Around the Net box in the sidebar and I’ll try to make sure to mark any really interesting content as I find it.
By the way, if you want to subscribe to a feed of just the stuff I’ve been sharing in Google Reader, you can use this feed right here.
I read a lot of stuff from around the internet. There’s a lot I could write about, but I’d just be echoing what someone else said. My contribution would only be “Hey! Look at this! This is cool!” So, rather than waste your time (and mine) with that, I’ve put a new feature into the sidebar: Stories from Around the Internet.
This is powered by Google Reader, which makes it really easy to share stories and put clips like this onto your website. It’s just a matter of copying and pasting some JavaScript snippets.
If you’re interested in what stories I think are cool, interesting, or informative, you can either check the clip on the left, or you can subscribe to my Shared Stories RSS feed.
My site, after two months, has finally been picked up in the Google index. Yay!
I found a neat little WordPress plugin that alters the administrative interface of WordPress to be much prettier. SpotMilk comes in both a black and a white version, and either is much better than the default theme. It’s not something y’all will ever see, but it makes the interface much prettier for me.
Welcome to JDHarper.com: Blog Jones Rebranded.
Why the change? There are several reasons, listed below:
First, the name Blog Jones is kind of limiting in what I can do: I can write a blog. If I ever get into podcasting, what would I call it? Podcast Jones?
Second, think that the name “Blog Jones” is a little silly-sounding and (to people who haven’t finished this post) it probably doesn’t make much sense.
The third reason for the rebranding is the origin of the site’s name. See, way back when I was starting my blog, blogging was still pretty new. I believed that I was the only blogger at Bob Jones University. (This may have even been true, in fact, since I started way, way back in August of 2003.) So, since I was the only blogger at Bob Jones, it made sense to call it Blog Jones. Bob -> Blog. Now that I’ve graduated from BJU it doesn’t make sense to carry the Jones name around anymore.
Anyways, welcome aboard, and thanks for migrating with me to my new domain name. If, by some miracle, you treasure some piece of content from the old Blog Jones domain, don’t worry. I’m keeping that up and running too. Your permalinks and bookmarks will not suffer link rot. Just be sure to save this site in your bookmarks and point your RSS Feed aggregators at the new JDHarper.com feed.
It’s a fresh, new start! I hope you all will stick around.
