Yep. I’ve done it again. Much like my previous blog post, I’ve completely cleaned and rewritten every nook and cranny of my entire blog. Over the last seven months, I’ve learned a lot of new programming techniques and I’ve been jonesing to try them out. Short of a handful of work projects, I haven’t really had a good outlet lately for all this new-found knowledge (NFK?).

So what’s new?

The most obvious change is probably the 468×60 banner ad in the upper-right corner of the site. Lately I’ve been very interested in the “What happens if I do this…” aspect of web development. While I do make a very (a very, very, very) small amount of revenue from my blog, I figured I would hop on the bandwagon and throw an ad in the same area as the logo. I did this for two reasons: People are used to it and I like money.

To combat feeling overwhelmed upon first arriving at the homepage, I’ve changed the homepage to display excerpts instead of the entire article. The homepage will also now display ten articles instead of five. This may be increased to 15 or 20, depending on frequency of content and user feedback.

I’ve changed the sharing icons at the top and bottom of each article to the AddThis Share Button. I know I’ve bad-mouthed them at least once and for that I apologize. Their website, functionality and overall experience has really stepped up since the last time I used their product.

Due to the increasing number of spam comments I receive, and since most users are probably already on Facebook, I decided to nix the default WordPress commenting system and implement the Facebook Comments social plugin. I’m still on the fence about this and not completely 100% sure if it’ll stay, but we’ll see. I’ve seen this plugin in action on several sites and it appears to hold it’s own, however there is always that looming question of “Where do my comments go if Facebook dies?”…

I’ve integrated Typekit fonts into the design. (TypeKit was acquired by Adobe, you know.) I figured that if I’m preaching to all my clients about how wonderful Typekit is, I might as well use it on my own website. For readability, I could probably get away with using the default Arial or Helvetica fonts, but those are boring. As of now, I’ve chosen Museo Sans as the font, but that could change in the next couple of days depending on user feedback.

I’ve also added a lot of other nerdy functionality that helps me more than it helps the user, so I won’t go into it much. Most of it was simplifying the programming of WordPress-based functions such as the: tag cloud, tag list, loop, and search form. I also added a couple meta data values to allow me to include an image, video or slideshow for each article.

What’s to come in the future.

Google Analytics has been pumping out a lot of really cool features lately. One of the features I’d like to explore in-depth is Events Tracking. This feature lets you track individual events on your website such as clicking a hyperlink, pressing play on a video, leaving the page, downloading a file, etc.

I’d also really like to get my repository of programming classes (aka “The END[SEVEN] Cloud”) visible on my website, whether on it’s own page or a simple sidebar widget. Spreading tutorials and snippets for each class is becoming difficult to manage with changes and consistency, so I’m hoping to come up with a better solution. Currently, all my files are stored at cloud.endseven.net (some beta files are not visible).

Share this!

I’m going to stick true to the methods of the site and share this article on the social networks I belong to using the AddThis Share Button. If you’re reading this and wouldn’t mind being a good chap, I would really appreciate it if you would do the same. This article can be shared at the top (before the giant wall of text) and bottom (after the giant wall of text) by clicking the appropriate icon, or by clicking the “+” icon if you can’t find the one you’re looking for. As always, thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy the improvements as much as I do.

Pip, pip! Cheerio!