You’ve Changed, Man

So here’s what happened.

Over the weekend I was doing a lot of back end work (oh stop). The old site had been around looking like it did for about four years and it was out of date in design and function.

A lot of the things in the sidebar like recent comments and posts were handcoded in by me, bits of code written by developers and dropped into the template manually. The recent version of wordpress that I upgraded to a couple of weeks ago has all those things built in, so it made managing the site easier. Previously, any changes made to the site took ages making sure any alterations didn’t mess up what was already in place.

There are some things I knew I wanted to do, and a few things I wanted to take away that I knew I don’t like. Like how the archive ran on for ever, or how the sidebar didn’t appear in posts. The latter didn’t matter til the stats got fatter (c’mon), and now more traffic to this site is from google which refers users to single, specific posts. Although most of those people will look at one post – read the songs about rivers entry and leave the site – it would be nice to give them the option to stay.

I will add some things back in, like the flickr widget so you can see photos, but other stuff has come out.

The links to other blogs has gone, as has the links to blog compendia, because to be honest, very little traffic goes out through there, and I rarely get traffic from other people’s links in their sidebars. I will, however, keep mentioning blogs I think are good, partly because of the likemindedness of readers, but also because when people do that to my site, there’s a context and those are the things that bring people in, so that’ll work for links out from here as well.

The site is wider, because people’s screen resolutions have changed and I can make more use of the space.

I’ve added more at social networking stuff so you can post their stuff to facebook pages, tweet posts you like, email pages, print stuff out (because that’s always been a problem, how to print stuff out from my site).

I also included Twitter updates here, since my updates are no longer protected.

It may or may not include advertising. I wasn’t going to, but baby needs a new pair of shoes. It’ll be unobtrusive if I do. We won’t have homepage takeovers where the site will be called This Is Steak paid for by the British Meat Council or anything, but there may be ads if I can make it look ok and only get it to appear every now and then and not to regular visitors.

On top of that I’ll get rid of the use of feed readers. Ever since RSS readers came about, fewer people visit this site. By taking away the option to syndicate this site, I can bring more people back to the proper site. Clever, eh?

OK, maybe that won’t work.

Now. The picture. I know, I know. Shhhhhhhhh. Shhhh. It’s OK. Shhhhh. OK?

OK.

The original picture was taken in 2005 on a digital camera that the mobile phone sitting in your sock drawer would put to shame. It’s the top bit of a picture taken from the Haut Corniche behind Monaco. It’s one of the best drives in the world – Rolls Royce named a fucking car after it, it’s that good. It’s like you’re driving into the sky, it’s arriving hopefully more than travelling, it’s a destination within a journey.

Anyway, that picture was very low resolution and grainy, so I switched it for a newer one. I lost the handwriting title because I just grew tired of seeing my scribble up there. If this one seems to polished, I may drop the other one back in, once I figure out how to remove the headline.

The picture you can see here now – and by that I mean today, because it may change again, so if you’re reading this in the future (?) this will make (have made?) no sense – I took in Brighton. It’s from the beach outside the Metropole hotel, if you know that edge my world. I was down there for a wedding and I had just bought a new camera.

I was early and it was a bright day with a north squall battering the seafront. I walked over the street and on to the beach and took a few pictures. I was standing on a concrete breaker out into the water. Right after I took this one, a gust blew the lens cap off its holder, lifted it twenty feet into the air before sending it into the English Channel and me running back for the beach from the looming waves. Still, I got my banner. You can see the rest of those pictures here.

There are other banners I might use later, but I liked this one the best. It might seem a little grey after time, or a little too inspirational. It’s like those posters you know? It wouldn’t look out of place to have an Eric Cantona quote under it.

It’s also odd having no blue in the site. I keep coming back here and going, “Is this right? It’s not right, is it? Does this seem right to you? It’s always had blue – what the fuck.”

Anyway – changes. And great things.

And didn’t think I’d have anything to write about today.