Over the weekend, I finally got annoyed with the fact I was running a version of Movable Type that had been obsolete more than five years, and upgraded my blog software. This is not a procedure I recommend to anyone. If you feel like running a blog and you're not the kind of digital control freak who wants total power over his online identity: go hosted.
- All the different RSS feeds are gone. There is now just the one atom feed at http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/atom.xml. All the old feed URLs should redirect to this feed.
- Comments are back, at least until spam pisses me off enough that I disable them again
- The new layout has been tested in Safari on the Mac, and vaguely looked at in Firefox 3 on the Mac. I'm assuming people will let me know if it doesn't work on their computers.
- I'm posting less promiscuously to Javablogs. The old javablogs feed was "everything nerd-related", now I'm only going to post Java-specific stuff.
Function follows form follows function:
It's not a particularly well-kept secret that I like the sound of my own voice. Over the years, this led to my blog being built around its longer posts (when you're blogging, anything over about four paragraphs is long). As a result, last time I redesigned my blog, it was optimised to put these article-length posts front and centre.
What I found, though, was this design discouraged me from posting. If what I had to say couldn't be stretched to multiple paragraphs, I'd as likely not say it. The result was that maintaining my blog became a chore. A lot of things I could have said with just a link, a quote and a (hopefully) pithy comment were never said, or worse were stretched into posts too long to sustain their source material.
A lot of this mental overflow ended up on delicio.us, or a sporadically maintained Tumblr blog, but it was never particularly satisfying because it was elsewhere.
As such, it's no coincidence that when I was forced to redo my blog's templates anyway, I gravitated towards a layout that owes a lot to Tumblr. Maybe this will help me update more often.
do i spot comic sans in your header?
Are the fishbowl quicklinks gone too? (I accidentally deleted that feed when I meant to delete the .rss feed to this blog.)
Glad you won't be using Tumblr anymore. Couldn't be bothered to subscribe there.
@pkmk: You might. The title style is actually something I haven't changed from the old layout. My stylesheet asks for a "cursive" font-family, which on my machine comes up as a rather pretty Apple Chancery, but which tends to be Comic Sans on less cultured machines. I'm torn as to whether I should fix this, or whether it's just punishment for running Windows. :)
@david: Quicklinks are temporarily gone. They'll be back, hopefully sooner than later, probably in a similar way to the Daring Fireball linked list.
For any redesign, someone has to say: "I liked the old colour scheme."
@Stewart I think you mean:
…except with more typos.
I quite like the new design. Looking forward to see you update more often! ;)
Some bug/feature submissions:
- this form doesn't seem to remember me.
- navigation between posts, please? Oh, I just noticed it down the bottom, never mind.
- email notification of subsequent comments, or a comments feed?
Hopefully those are simple plugin downloads or include items in your templates.
Colour scheme? All I get is a plain gray page, but that's (I think) because it's only using my 'default color scheme' in FF2 options.