Posts
As you can see, I have just finished some revisions to this blog's template. The main changes are a new header and an additional sidebar. The left-hand sidebar contains previous posts and links for subscribing by email or ATOM feed, while the right-hand sidebar contains links to other websites. One holdup to posting the revised template was that the right-hand sidebar was doing strange things in Internet Explorer. I think those problems are fixed now, but if not, let me know. This blog does look best when viewed in Firefox. (Not to mention that Firefox is a much better browser overall, and features lots of neat extensions.)
One reason that I revised the template was because I wanted to make my archives more accessible, in particular in a way that would highlight my best posts from the past. To that end, I went through my archives myself and pulled out several that I thought were particularly good and put them in the left sidebar under the "Representative Posts" heading. Most of these have appeared in various blog carnivals.
In addition, I added a "Destinations" list. These are my frequent birding spots around DC. The idea for this came from a Five Wells piece on implementing "categories" in Blogger with Google blogsearches. To round out the left bar I added a search box provided by blogbar. This searchbox appears to be quite powerful, and can search either this site or the internet. Unfortunately it only seems to work if you click "OK" - just hitting "Enter" will not send the command.
The right sidebar changed little except for the removal of some material to the left side. I also updated several changed links and fixed broken ones. All should work now. I also have removed several images and bits of code that were holding up page loading times. I hope that the site's performance will be improved after this. If not, I may have to remove more, though I am hesitant to do so.
Feel free to leave thoughts, complaints, etc., in the comments.
One reason that I revised the template was because I wanted to make my archives more accessible, in particular in a way that would highlight my best posts from the past. To that end, I went through my archives myself and pulled out several that I thought were particularly good and put them in the left sidebar under the "Representative Posts" heading. Most of these have appeared in various blog carnivals.
In addition, I added a "Destinations" list. These are my frequent birding spots around DC. The idea for this came from a Five Wells piece on implementing "categories" in Blogger with Google blogsearches. To round out the left bar I added a search box provided by blogbar. This searchbox appears to be quite powerful, and can search either this site or the internet. Unfortunately it only seems to work if you click "OK" - just hitting "Enter" will not send the command.
The right sidebar changed little except for the removal of some material to the left side. I also updated several changed links and fixed broken ones. All should work now. I also have removed several images and bits of code that were holding up page loading times. I hope that the site's performance will be improved after this. If not, I may have to remove more, though I am hesitant to do so.
Feel free to leave thoughts, complaints, etc., in the comments.
