So you may have noticed that things look a little different here at One Hoopy Frood today. That would be because I have switched over to my newly re-designed blog. I’ve had the design done for about a week, and wanted to spend a little more time playing with it and tweaking it, but some events pushed me to unveil it even earlier (mainly some problems with some recent changes with blogger.com’s software).

In addition to the new look and feel, I’ve also switched to WordPress as my blogging software from Blogger.com. I still think Blogger.com is a great service (my Other Blog is still using blogger), but as I had mentioned before, it lacked some features that I wanted to use. Basically, I outgrew it.

So let me give you a tour of my new humble abode on the web, and also talk about some of my expansion plans! I decided to go with a pretty traditional blog layout, with a blog header image across the top, the content on the left, and a sidebar along the right. The picture in the blog header is from the balcony in the South of France where Margaret and I stayed last year (did you catch the HHGTTG reference in there?).

The biggest change in the new layout is all the cool new features available in the sidebar. Starting at the top we have a list of Recent Updates that I have made to the blog. Currently it is set to 3, I may make it more it the future. Below that we have some links, currently only a link to my Wife’s blog. Under Tags we have a “Tag Cosmos”. Instead of having every post put into a category, I tag each post with some keywords to describe it. I have a tool that puts together a “Tag Cosmos”, where the size/intensity of the text of the tag indicates how often I’ve blogged about in. You can click on those tags to see all the blog posts about that topic.

Below that under the heading of Archives is a calendar where you can navigate all my back posts to see what else I’ve written about. Following is a Yet To Be Utilized “Pages” heading, where I will have a list of the static pages (ie. non blog posts) available. And finally a Search box where you can search this blog.

And I have more changes in store in the future. I want each post to be able to lists which tags are associated with it. In addition, I want to more fully utilize the trackback feature to allow me to track and publish who has linked to posts of mine. I also fully expect to constantly be making tweaks to the blog to make it easier to use and better.

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