Why Dont You Blog?

Infinite thanks to the people who’ve taken the trouble to comment on the downward spiral that is this blog’s theme. It has been a great help.

And an apology is for the fact that the redesign is interfering with there actally being any readable content.

On a “while the cat’s away” basis I’ve done some theme hacks that will bring down the wrath of TW for being deprecated and/or non-compliant (negative margins, for instance. I’ve havent cracked and used tables yet.)

I think that it works in ie6 at 100% and doesnt degrade too badly when you shrink the window.

Havent even broached ff yet so it may get rebuilt in the next few minutes and I am pretty fearful of what will happen on mobiles.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

As mentioned previously, we have added some new plugins here and it seems they have broken the theme quite badly. This leaves us with two choices, and as the theme itself has become a bit annoying (second thoughts over the sponsored links, for example), it seems it is time to try out a new theme. The last time we tried this, there were problems in the old versions of IE so I would appreciate it if people can let us know what you think of the layout of the site now.

In addition a “struggle” is ongoing (offline) against the CSS files but when it is won (and by Toutatis it will be WON), we will be moving (again) to a bespoke theme. Thank you for your patience.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

Short, administrative, comment for now. We have added some new plugins (for example the “sphere” one you can see at the bottom of most posts) and will be trialling a new theme over the next few days. Please let us know what you think - your feedback is always welcome.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Popularity: 14% [?]

As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we have been trying out new themes for the blog (the joys of WordPress).

It looks like this is the one we are going to settle on, and it will remain in use for the next few days. Can you take a moment to let us know what you think please? Good and bad comments are welcome here.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 19% [?]

This blog has been going through some traumatic changes to its functionality.

It doesn’t look much different because most of the changes to its appearance were repellent in IE6 and earlier browsers, although they looked great in IE7, so it’s temporarily reverted to a look which it’s had for .. oh, I don’t know… all of about 6 weeks.

The main differences for visitors is that you can find much more by tags, as if the blog was trying to be a mini-Technorati. You can open the Tag Archive page and search on several tags. (These are even presented in a tag cloud.)

The big difference for us is that we can tag things by just clicking on them. Adding tags used to be like pulling teeth. It probably contributed to my blogs being unfeasibly long because I couldn’t bear to have to go through the tagging process again (like a graffiti artist with a sore arm?) So the outcome should be less blog words, more tag words. Or at least, more tag words.

However, we don’t have full tagging liftoff yet.The older posts either don’t have any tags or only have Wordpress category tags. By older, I mean “up to January 2007″. So that’s nearly all of them. As the posts here go back over a year, it’s an arduous task to add tags and it’s getting done piecemeal. All the same. it should be possible to find most of what we have for most of the topics.

And by the way, why do people keep typing “none” into the search bit in the header? This is just bizarre. It’s not when people click on the search box without putting anything in, because that brings up a blank page.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Popularity: 30% [?]

If you haven’t already seen the news on the CompuSkills Web design blog, there is a new “parent” site for Why Dont You under construction.

This site is expected to be ready by July this year, and will be the home to a variety of articles on some of the topics we blog about here. We are aiming to include quite a bit on philosophy and logic, and possibly expose some of the more common fallacies people fall prey to.

You can see the design of the site as it it evolves on the CompuSkills design testbed - if there is anything you would like to see, or something you would like to know about let us know.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Popularity: 13% [?]

I dont know if you have had the chance to read the Compuskills Web Design Blog recently, but as mentioned there we have been working on a fairly large overhaul on the Compuskills site. Most of the work has been to convert the previous pages into a database served CMS, with only minor cosmetic changes.

Everything has gone well, the new site should be live tonight and we can get back to the business of ranting and raving here again

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]