Personal

Site update

If you've never visited the site before, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed, or create an email subscription using the link at the top. Enjoy the site, and thanks for visiting!

A site redesign has been on the cards for a while. I was never entirely happy with the layout of the previous version of Is There Food; it was entirely too boxy for my liking. After reading an article on the holy grail of css layouts over at A List Apart, I decided I would totally reinvent the site. I'd create a new banner, a new layout, and I'd do it from scratch. I would be intimately acquainted with the css that drives my site, and I would feel like a real man.

But why reinvent the wheel? The layout I was working towards wasn't entirely unlike many that had gone before, and I was experiencing the maddening consequences of a multiple browser world first hand. Oh I've always been aware of them, and I've butted heads with them in the past, but I've never gone to war with them. And little old me versus the mutated css nightmares that exist in the great "out there" was a losing battle.

Enter K2. Not the mountain, but the glorious Wordpress template framework. K2 is a wonderful thing, allowing you to concentrate on skinning the site, while it takes care of most of the layout problems. It also adds a variety of nice features, like the live search (go and start typing something into the search bar…I'll wait). And by all accounts there's more to come. The end result isn't dramatically different from what existed before; I've moved the sidebar to the right, and added a few features. The font has changed, and I've tweaked some of the borders on things. Despite that, I think the changes are significant. The site feels far less boxy, and far more open. I may tweak a little more over the next few days, but I wanted to make the changes live now.

Here's a few of the new things I've added: 

Archive - My thoughts on archives: Why invest significant amounts of sidebar space on something that the vast majority of visitors will never use? If a visitor is actually looking for your archive, they won't mind an extra click to get there. Thanks to the Extended Live Archive plugin, I've shifted all the archive functionality off onto its own page. Much cleaner, if you ask me.

Recent purchases (Amazon) - as I buy things, I'll update the Recent purchases section. I might also add a wishlist section at some point too. All the items in this section link off to Amazon, but I didn't necessarily get them from there, it's just that the Amazon Media Manager is such a handy little tool that it made sense to do it that way.

Del.icio.us - I've also tapped the Del.icio.us link roll functionality to display my del.icio.us links on the sidebar. As I come across things on a daily basis, if they're interesting links but not worth a post in their own right, they'll live there.

Contact form - I've added a contact form. No real reason, and I'm not convinced that anyone will use it, but it's there.

About pages - The about pages still exist, but you have to drill down into the other sections. Again, not a big deal - Google will still get you there, and if you're browsing you'll likely click through to them.

Asides - I need to do a little housekeeping first, but I'm going to post "asides" in the sidebar at some point. These will mainly be to do with Wordpress version updates, little technical details, etc. All the major content will still appear in the main column of text.

So there we have it - the new look Is There Food. I'm quite happy with it, and I hope that you like it too. 

© 2006 Is there food?.