New look for Khymos

new-khymos

This is off topic, but I just thought I’d write short note to say that I’ve brushed up the look of the blog. New elements included are a menu bar and an extra column. This will hopefully make navigation easier. And you might also notice that the page width has increased, allowing me to post pictures 620 pixels wide. I look forward to that 😉

In the near future I plan to transfer the pages with listings from the static pages (khymos.org) to the menu bar of the blog (blog.khymos.org) as this will allow me to use one publishing platform for updates. The remaining pages will probably be posted as blogposts. A number of things can go wrong when doing changes like this, so I’d be grateful if you could report issues (especially browser issues) you might encounter around the site.

In case you wonder about the technical details: I run the latest version of WordPress with a modified version of the Contender theme. The dropdown menus are from Pixopoint.

Update:
Some compatibility issues between an anti-spam plugin and the commentfrom caused all commenters to be met with the following: “Sorry, but it seems you are a spambot”. This should be fixed now.

10 Comments

  1. Looks good. I also use WordPress, and just went through the update to the latest version (from a much older version). There were a lot of hitches, and I still haven’t gotten them all worked out.

    By the way, I’m only seeing one sidebar column at right. I’m missing the whole Amazon.com box, and it still isn’t visible, even if I scroll down. I’m using Firefox 3.0.5, on Windows Vista, and my screen resolution is 1280×800. There’s plenty of room for another column, it’s just not there. The theme still extends out as if there were another column (the menu bar and the RSS Subscribe link). It seems like maybe the Amazon.com box just isn’t loading.

  2. Thank’s for the feedback.

    So far I’ve tested with Opera 9.63 and IE 6.0 in Windows XP and Windows 2000, and Firefox 3.0.5 in Windows 2000 without problems. Any one else having problems viewing all three columns?

  3. Ah, it turns out that the Amazon box and the Google ad were being blocked by the plugin “Adblock Plus.” When I disabled it, they showed up. That is a very popular plugin, though, so you should know that many of your readers may not be seeing those ads.

  4. I use the Opera browser and have a widescreen monitor and the whole website is shifted left instead of centered. Just thought I’d let you know!

    Other than the left-ness, it looks great! Simple and clean.

  5. It also seems like you’re not publishing articles in full in the RSS feed now.

    While it might not be a huge deal, I’d imagine that a fair number of readers follow the feed, and only getting the first few lines is quite annoying and makes it far less likely that the whole article gets read!

  6. Hi Martin,

    The new look is nice. It views fine for me in Safari and Webkit, so no problems there.

    I second esr’s view that it is annoying not to have the fully text of the articles in the RSS feed. I read so many posts per day that (even though your blog is one of my favourites) I might not clickthrough and read it.

    I hope you’ll reconsider this policy as it is inconvenient for at least some of your loyal leaders. Best of luck with the New Year’s postings…

  7. Barzelay: That’s OK. Then I know everything is working on my side.

    Katie: I actually shifted it left on purpose cause I thought it looked good. It’s a matter of taste. Perhaps I’ll change it back again 🙂

    esr/MrSousVide: Fixed!

    I’ve “burnt” the feed through feedburner as this allows me to add extra functionality at the end of each post (# of comments + digg/delicious/stumble/facebook sharing). The address of the “new” feed is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/khymos and you can easily access it by pressing the RSS icon in the header (big orange box).

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