Off Topic With Ashley

It’s been a long time coming, and I’ve been working on various incarnations of this since last year, but it’s finally here. I finally have a new blog theme.

It’s a new site, really. I’ve integrated a couple of sites into the one back-end which will make editing and keeping track of all my resources a whole heap easier. It’s also completely widget based whereas my old site was mainly just a bunch of ugly hacks overlaid on each other. I’m impressed with what I’ve got so far, though I’m planning a few more things.

• Namely I need to go through and revise my stylesheet. I’ve put this site on-line because otherwise it will sit there unfinished for the rest of time. I particularly want to take care of the typography, small screen rendering <=640px (Although as is my personal specialty, making the font smaller will fit it in 800*600.) I’d also like to go through and optimise a bunch of currently awkward things.
• I’m going to extend my blog and make proper use of categories, tags, and search. At the moment it’s a bit straightforward (although so was my old one, so this point isn’t so urgent.)
• I’m going to resume my Buddycloud geolocation project. I’ve got a working prototype although it need some serious love before it’s production ready.
• I’m also planning of mashing up last.fm with my music blog. I don’t have a music blog right now, I have a music “category”, but a girl can dream.
• Skip links are missing.
• Twitter is broken because I’m lazy, and Twitter is smarty.

Phwoar, it’s been a pretty hectic afternoon getting this all ready, and now it’s all working with very minimal fuss it’s kind of anticlimactic. I’ll wait to make sure it doesn’t fall apart before the morning until I claim it a success.

Until then, you’re welcome and indeed I encourage you to go through and find as many problems with the site as you can. No issue too small; leave a comment, a bunch of comments, or send me an email with bug reports! I expect there’s probably still one or two or three or four lurking around, but if you can’t find any then give me your toughest critique. I want to be crying uncontrollably by this time tomorrow.