The feeling of upgrading and redesigning your blog is comparable to that of celebrating your son’s first birthday. Although I have to admit I haven’t experienced the latter yet.
For those longtime readers of Devthought, or at least for those who can notice the change, I offer a walkthrough of this long awaited modification.
Better content organization
To keep content coming to you whenever I have time, I’ve separated the articles and explanations in the Blog section, while small tips, fun stuff and links are now in the Thought page, which acts as a tumblelog.
Projects, scripts and the MooTools plugins you’ve come to love are also in their special place, for quick access to downloads, READMEs, demos and examples.
Finally, the home displays a featured article picked by me, by using the new WordPress 2.7 sticky feature.
A nicer design
The previous blog failed to convey my design and UI crafting skills. I decided to come up with a fresher look and a header animation that reminds you of my Javascript and MooTools addiction on each visit.
I coded a flexible Weather animation class that will allow me to extend the weather variations in the future. Maybe sometime I’ll make it match with the visitor’s country current weather :)
Ajaxification
The posts and comments navigation, search and comment submission experience has been drastically improved by incorporating ajax calls. Special URLs are formed by Javascript so that WP-Super-Cache still does its job, which means speed and server reliability is assured.
Naturally, everything works if you turn Javascript off.
Syntax highlighting
I’ve integrated and modified the WP-Syntax plugin so that all snippets of code are syntax highlighted, ready to download, print and copy.
This is a snippet of code
| row 1, cell 1 | row 1, cell 2 |
| row 2, cell 1 | row 2, cell 2 |
Twitter integration
Even though I’m not a huge Twitter fan (not that I’ve got anything against it), the rest of the world seems to be. Here’s how it’s integrated:
- My last tweet is displayed on the homepage
- Whenever I write a new post, a tweet is automatically sent
- The tweetbacks (Twitter responses) are displayed next to the comments and pingbacks
18 Comments
It is awesome Guillermo! I love the new design =)
Good work.
The draggable clouds are awesome.
This is very awesome. Nice work!
Hi.
That really great design. Awesome!
By the way i’m using WP-Syntax Highlighter plugin like you but i have an issue with
line numbers. Line numbers are showing very strange (screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/VIQk5oHcH)
So how you did fix this problem?
Thanks.
I didn’t experience that issue. I would suggest you use a fixed-width typeface (ie: fonts usually meant for coding).
nice clouds
Dude, the clouds are sick!!!
Nice work! Soon I will send you those questions.
Cheers!
Great design, nice content! Add a favicon to make it complete!
Congrats on the new design Guillermo. very nice.
I love your weather header, any chance you will eventually share the code with us?
Love the new site Guillermo! Bien hecho como siempre.
Your clouds animation is really nice and ingenious.
Your blog design is cool too.
Congrats :)
The weather animation is awesome! It’ll be very great if you write a tutorial about that! :)
Its prety good! Congratulations.
your weather script look like cools :P
hello mr. Guillermo Rauch. i love ur weather animation (header of this website). may u share bout the script to us. cos i’d like to use some animation like that to my site. its cooooll.. thank b4
U R THE ONE !
I really like the weather header, cool. It would be great to write about your experience making it.