Redesign

The Past Tense had its first redesign—and it was not because I was upgrading to WordPress 2.0. Rather, I thought if I were to redesign I might as well use the latest version. Upgrading was a bit of a pain as my old theme and WP installation were not so neat—but hey, I’ve had worse.

The new design sticks to the old theme of black and blue with some hastily-drawn flowery-thingies on top. I gave myself some room to play with by adding a sidebar to the layout. This enables me to link to my fellow 9rules-ho’s, display some other links, some more links (hey, it’s a blog) and some ads to pay the bills. But that’s not all. I’ve changed the main typeface to enhance readability and I’ve paid a little more attention to alternate style sheets this time. See this in action by hitting print preview, or, if you’re a Firefox-user, choosing the ‘enhanced contrast’-stylesheet.

Two more important changes: commenting and series. I’ve enabled commenting to see if this site can spark some discussion. Even when sticking to the facts, nothing is more subjective than history and I am pretty sure people are going to disagree with my writing. Let’s see if they want to raise their voices. And, with a little WordPress plug-in magic, I’ve now tied posts in a series together. You can now browse through a series and skip other posts that come in between the series’ articles. It even has a table of contents.

Last, and certainly also least, I’ve extended the metadata-blah blah at the end of every article, even giving you the chance to post the article directly to del.icio.us. What more could you possibly want?

That about wraps it up. If you notice anything odd or broken, let me know and I’ll fix it. Now get away from the computer and go enjoy the holidays.

UPDATE: I noticed my redesign has some “issues” in IE, but I can’t be bothered too much about that. I’ll look into it next time I have an entire weekend off, if you catch my drift.