Addressing New 2009 Blog Changes and Features


I didn’t exactly post about the updates to this blog for 2009, but I’d like to address two new features that have been added. Before I get to them, to clarify, portfolioso.com and the blog are not the same. The blog contains all my posts, and the latest blog post gets fed to my homepage. The website is the same (black layout). The changes being discussed are with the blog. Anyway, On the backend, the blog was updated to WordPress 2.7, which is absolutely ballin’. But that doesn’t matter because it doesn’t affect users, only me with my uber admin posting panel. Things that do affect you:

  • New Layout – The other one was ugly, purple and hard to navigate. This one is sleek and cool. It’s also better at CSS and XHTML. Awesome.
  • Paginator – What the hell is that? Well if you scroll to the bottom of the blog, it dynamically generates links to the next few pages of posts rather than an “older posts” link. This lets you skip ahead more easily. You can also go back. It’s intelligent, so if you’re on page 8, it will generate links to the pages surrounding it. So if you’re on page 5 of my posts, you’ll see: [First]…[Previous] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [Next]…[Last].
  • Collapsing Archives – The blog goes back to 2003 and it listed every month. That’s way too much and you had to scroll 3 miles to get to the bottom. So I now have a collapsing archive menu on the side which is sweet and has everything, but it’s animated, collapses and saves space. Woo.
  • Search – I think I had a search but it stunk. This one’s integrated nicely on the top right
  • Captcha – Sorry about this one. I was getting a lot of random registrations and added this to prevent spam. Now you need to read an image and type it into a box to register and post comments. Don’t worry, it’s not that hard
  • Tag Cloud – I’m trying to turn this into more of a credible (haha, well technologically advanced) blog, so I added a tag cloud with specific topics and things I discuss frequently. Check it on the right menu. The bigger words have more posts. It’s neat.

I think that’s about it. I like the new features so much I might actually blog more, and be more serious and professional about it. Have fun!