New layout

I’ve changed the layout of the site. The only major non-techy problem I can see, or rather can’t, is the colour scheme. It should be blue and orange which are complimentary colours. However, the colours I see are a green background and yellow borders. If it’s all too much of an eyesore leave a comment and I’ll try to change it.

It’s not finished. I need to add the recent comments plugin, sitemeter, re-integrate the photo album and so on, but this is roughly what it will look like for a while.

The reasons for the change if you’re interested are below the fold. The first layout I used was Wuhan Autumn which I dropped after having trouble squeezing photos in. I took the bits I liked which was mainly the search/link bar and spliced it into Landzilla. There’s a lot I like about Landzilla, but the big problem is that it loads the sidebar first. This means that anything put in the side bar has to download before the content does. If the Sitemeter server is a bit slow, or the Technorati server, then putting these buttons in the sidebar will cause the page to jam – which is why those buttons tended to be a mess at the bottom of the page. This wasn’t a huge problem – but integrating with Newsgator makes it a problem again. The Newsgator columns Seen Elsewhere and Also reading are to be displayed vertically, they can’t really go in a footer. Putting them in the sidebar was causing the page to lock when Newsgator was slow to respond.

The stylish solution would be to re-write the template from the German/English mash it was in and alter the layout. But given that Regulus already does 90% of what I want it to do it seemed like an awful lot of unnecessary work. Regulus does seem to be a lot more flexible to work with, so unless WordPress 1.6 spectacularly breaks something I imagine this is how the site will look for the next six months – barring bouts of piracy or Britney Spears. The information stored locally loads first and the external tools load while the main text is being read. —–