The New Look

It's that time again, the re-design is upon us. It's not entirely finished and I'm not 100% happy, but it was well past due, so as version four fades into memory, I unleash version 5 of The Digerati Peninsula.

I've been wanting to change it for some time, since about January, but the time it was going to take put me off the idea. With so many great WordPress templates being produced, I thought one of them must be ready, both capable and stylish, and that I could just use one of those, maybe adjust the colours, but let that do everything. None of the templates I found did what I wanted however, and changing them to fit was going to take as long as building my own. I found this on the recent re-design of Potter's Place, although it uses a standard template, it still took a lot of time to adapt. In the end I gave in and started the TDP re-design from scratch.

Aside from the obvious overhaul of the visuals, there's been some serious changes under the hood too. Gone are the Blog and Archive super-categories, they seemed superfluous, so now everything fits into a top-level category.

I've added a deluge of plugins to help with some of the new features, which allow things like editing your comments, quoting other comments, the improved print function (I hacked the last version of this plugin and, although they've included the functionality now, I wanted the link count to appear after the link text, so I had to amend it again too). I hacked the likes of related articles and recent articles plugins to give me more functionality (originally they were being used in more places than they are now).

I used the very sexy (and free) Silk icons from FamFamFam, to help spruce the place up a bit, but generally my content first, lots of whitespace, text-based approach provailed (mainly for speed reasons, although laziness and a lack of graphical imagination also helped).

Partly this re-design was for me, to make the place a little nicer to visit, and hence, encourage me to do so, it was also meant to help readability to the site, allow people to surf around more. Anyway, here it is.