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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.
by Patrix | on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 4:30 pm | 
Personal, Weblogs, World Wide Web . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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March 1st, 2007 at 5:34 pm reply
Pat,
This looks cool. Though font size is a little too small. Yeah, K2 is now kind of dated.
March 1st, 2007 at 6:42 pm reply
Confused, thanks :) I did increase the font size. I wonder what resolution are you guys viewing it at. Any bigger and it looks like those large print books.
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:53 am reply
Hey Patrix,
I have a love-hate thing with K2 because it’s really easy to customize in terms of functionality but really difficult to customize in terms of aesthetics. I have taken it off too till I have the time and the css gyan to do it properly.
I’m facing the same “slows your blog down to a crawl” problem with MyBlogLog, although I haven’t removed it yet. Tonight then.
The font size looks OK to me, and the flickr pictures do look interesting. :D
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:55 am reply
Hey, thanks for the e-mail about the comments not working on my blog. A dozen other people also mailed in. It’s fixed now.
March 2nd, 2007 at 9:59 am reply
Gauravonomics, thanks for fixing the comments. I had left a long comment on your RSS feeds post and then damn! couldn’t get to submit it.
You’re right about K2. It is extremely powerful and packed with features. But for CSS and PHP novices like us, it can be quite overwhelming to edit the templates.
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:00 am reply
You may want to increase the width of your links column (the black column to the right). In IE7 (go ahead, flame me :)) the search box is 25 px too long.
The archives run too long. May be you can add, on your wishlist, an expand-on-click list: show only years, expand to all months when someone clicks or mouse-overs.
Ads seem distracting. I don’t know why. I say that because I have seen other sites with a large number of ads, but they don’t seem distracting. May be it will take a few visits to get used to.
“align: justify” is a poor option, I think, for the right column. Its too narrow to “justify” the text. Left or right align is perhaps better.
March 2nd, 2007 at 12:19 pm reply
cool theme partix. I like thois one better than the previous one. I like the 100% width…
March 2nd, 2007 at 2:48 pm reply
Niket, thanks for your feedback. As with any theme on this blog, it is a work in progress. I’m trying to fix the archives too and also separate the ‘justify’ option for content and sidebar. BTW, the site looks much better in IE7 :) I haven’t opened IE in a while so dinn realize.
Rohan, thanks. I bet you have some solutions for the tech problems I’m facing.
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:14 pm reply
Wow…..
The layout and the colors are awesome.
Good work.
March 4th, 2007 at 9:01 pm reply
[...] believe content is king, that shouldn’t bother you. Of course, occasionally blog authors make drastic changes to their template and solicit comments which many of us are glad to oblige them [...]
March 5th, 2007 at 3:00 pm reply
speaking of spam and authenticated comments… I strongly sugegst you check out http://pamelaproject.com
trust me. Pam is just awesome, when it comes to web 2.0 technologies, a strong opponent of spam-bots/trolls, and knows whats shes talking about…
Pam’s made implementing “authenticated” comments so easy to implement… especially for wordpress users…
I have seen several auth contexts come and go.. but “infocard” is here to stay.. it’s microsoft… it may take a few years for infocard to go bust.. (like what happened to pasport), but my gut feeling is that “cardspace aka:infocard” is here to stay…
I’m throwing in openid and infocard auth on all my websites… someday soon we’d all be using it.. I’m sure… so do it now.. and not just be way ahead of the game, you’d actualy be advocating it by using it…