Welcome to goer.org 3.0

By Evan — — Web

goer.org: weblog. A website barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it.
We have
the technology.
We have the capability to make the world’s first…
errr, scratch that, we have the capability to make Evan’s first
not-completely-hideous website. goer.org will be that website. Better than
it was before. Better… stronger… faster.

Yes, after almost five years, I’ve finally redesigned the ol’ blog template. Out with the hideous green of goer.org 2.0, and in with the soothing earth tones of goer.org 3.0! (Hmm, so what was goer.org 1.0, then? You really don’t want to know.)

Aside from being vaguely displayable in Netscape Navigator 4, the previous design had very little to recommend it. The new design has several advantages over the old, including:

  • It’s not hideously green.
  • Oh, it’s hideously brown, you say? Well, according to Microsoft, brown is the new black. So there.
  • As an added bonus, this design is one of the only sites out there where the little orange “feed” icons actually sort of harmonize.
  • Atom 1.0 feeds. I was going to hilariously title this post, “Up and Atom!”, but then I discovered I was only about the 800th person to come up with that.
  • Individual entry archives. The old blog had everything filed away on monthly archives (mimicking the format from back before I had blog software) and presented comments in a separate pop-up window (a hack from back when Phil Ringnalda taunted me into opening up comments, and that turned out the quickest way to enable them.) Now each post has its own page and its own set of permalinkable comments. Technology marches on!
  • You can now post comments using a subset of John Gruber’s Markdown. That means bulleted lists, blockquotes, preformatted code blocks, and other goodies.
  • There is a de.licio.us-powered linkroll.
  • The site has migrated to MT 3, which has a wide array of nifty new features to play with.
  • Did I mention, not hideously green?

Plus many other minor tweaks. And newly-introduced bugs. For one thing, this template looks a little sketchy in Internet Explorer 6. For one thing, the blockquotes are causing weird formatting glitches. Also, IE 6 does not seem to like border-style: dotted. But I’m sure this is all fixed in IE 7.

A final note: the banner at the top is a composite of photographs from Flickr. I can’t take a picture worth a damn, but fortunately other people can… and not only that, they sometimes release their work under a Creative Commons license. So thank you to the following people for making this redesign possible:

And that’s all for now. Technically, this blog only has one post in it, so I’d better start filling it up. Don’t want to look like a newb…

15 thoughts on “Welcome to goer.org 3.0”

  1. I love the images at the top.
    The sidebar is good.
    The IDEA of earthtones is good too.
    …BUT…
    Something is not quite right. Something with the colors. I am not a color expert. I think I remember that you may have a friend who is a designer. Ask her.

  2. Maybe it’s just way too brown? There’s a little orange in the links, but other than that, not a lot of variation.

    Besides orange, other colors in the banner that I could try to pick up would be red and grey.

  4. Heh. Well, this is going to be tricky.

    I thought maybe I could change the base background color to white (from its current very very pale brown). But that looks really harsh.

    But adding great swathes of red or orange will be tricky too. Hmmmm.

  5. The brown looks good, but I would suggest something other than orange to spice it up. Dare I say some earthy green? Or are you traumatized by green 2.0 rev?

    My default installation of PithHelmet killed all of the images in your top bar. Kind of annoying. Easy enough for me to fix with an exception, but I’m not really sure why they were being blocked in the first place…

  6. I am a little traumatized by the green, but I could give it a shot. There isn’t much green in the banner image though, so it would be tricky to come up with the right shade.

    Not sure what’s up with PithHelmet — maybe it thought the banner image was too close to a standard ad banner?

  7. Evan,

    I’m not sure if you care about the banner being blocked. But if you do, you might try changing “banner.gif” to some other (less offesive) name.

    I was not able to find any regex in PithHelmet that would cause that image to be blocked, but I am a complete regex wimp. And I did find this: http://si7.shauninman.com/mentary/past/banned.php

    I’ll happily try it out if you want to try a change.

  10. Out of interest, why run the new blog in a separate installation of MT, when you could upgrade MT for the whole site and put your snazzay new skin on everything?

  12. Your autodiscovery link (link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom” href=”/Feeds/atom.xml”) is 404.

    Oh, and welcome to Planet Intertwingly. 🙂

  13. Oh, sonova — !! Thanks, Sam.

    I thought I caught that when I moved the site from testing to live. I’m going to have to fire the entire goer.org QA department. Again.

    Unfortunately my old RSS feed is still frozen in time. If I simply redirected the RSS feed to the Atom feed, I wonder whether that would break anything…

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