Nerve Endings Firing Away

Less than two weeks after I announced ‘grand changes’ in my blog theme, I have gone ahead and changed it yet again proving that I care more about template tinkering than actually writing on it. I ditched my long-time favorite K2 theme and tried out something more simple. I like a three-column layout but without the clutter. This theme, Fluid Solution is developed by Kaushal Sheth. Several people had commented on the cluttered look and information overload when I last changed the look. After desperately trying to argue that it wasn’t so, I finally reconciled to the fact that it is true and not many are interested in my del.icio.us links or Digg duggs.

And of course, the grand exercise of Asides also comes to an end, partly because I don’t think it has an audience and even if it does I can always revive my ‘Linking Park’ (remember that, right?). In addition, I’m a contributor at Amit Varma’s India Uncut Linkastic. Apart from my links, you come across lots of eclectic nuggets from the Web out there so give it a dekho sometime.

Also, I am a contributor at Policy Wise, a group blog started by Confused. The posts I have made out there so far are on The HPV Dilemma, Plight of the Homeless, and well, that’s it. Confused has been as patient as I am with some contributors on DesiPundit but I promise to clean up my act and post more regularly. These posts are and will be cross-posted on my other blogs too but add Policy Wise to your feed because frankly other contributors are writing far better stuff than I can write right now.

Please note the Flickr photos that I managed to place instead of a default logo. That took me the longest to figure out so any appreciation is welcome. I retain the sidebar buttons (Text Link Ads, Google Adsense, and Review Me) but got rid of the MyBlogLog widget (and code) because it was slowing down my blog load time. Did you know that a reader will go away if your blog takes more than 4 seconds to load? Check the load time of your blog. This blog (73.03 KB) currently takes 2.68 seconds.

The front page has minimum and less intrusive ads but the single pages have three ad units above the fold but I think they aren’t too distracting. The positioning of the ads was mainly done in accordance with Adsense optimization and trust me, it works. I’ll probably make a post on what I have learned.

I know I haven’t talked about the biggest complaint (the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’) readers have had since I changed the theme. Your comments are being spanked as spam although you have been approved before. To be honest, I too am unable to understand why that is so. I have posted my question in the WP Support Forum and have also emailed the theme author. So until then, I promise to regularly check the spam queue and recover your spanked comments. So don’t worry, your comments aren’t lost.

Anyway, enough of design updates, I’ll write something ‘insightful’ over the weekend.