Site Developments

Hello again every­one! How have you been? It’s been a busy time for all of us, and after a cou­ple months of not updat­ing this blog like I used to nor­mally — I’m back, and Asnio is back in full swing.

There has always been a lot of plans I wanted to carry out here but never got around to in the sum­mer. I plan to carry these things out this upcom­ing sea­son how­ever, and there will be more on that stuff later. But, I have excit­ing news for you now:

The New Design

Yes, if you haven’t noticed, the new design I have been tweet­ing about for the last few days on Twit­ter has finally been put up. I started the design back in July, but never fin­ished it. At first I was going to release it for free at Blo­gus­sion, but as I started work­ing on it more I decided it would be a great way to refresh Asnio for when I go back to work­ing here. But there is more planned for this design later.

So the one thing I focused on with this design is nav­i­ga­tion. Nav­i­ga­tion is an impor­tant part of a blog, and I felt like the tiny nav bar at the top of the blog in the pre­vi­ous design wasn’t doing much.

New Nav­i­ga­tion vs. old

As you can now see, the nav­i­ga­tion bar sticks out much more than it pre­vi­ously did and looks much more appeal­ing. In the blue bar, I have placed the pages on my blog that you can access, like learn­ing about me, or my pile of free stuff. Below that are some of the cat­e­gories on the blog where the most inter­est­ing con­tent is placed. You can of course see the full list of cat­e­gories in the new, gor­geous footer.

Right below the nav­i­ga­tion to the right of the page I have used the Mul­ti­me­dia box fea­ture in The­sis to cre­ate a ran­dom rotat­ing images sec­tion where I have included three ban­ners to dif­fer­ent places on the blog that I want you to visit the most:

• The­sis Thurs­day — A weekly series ded­i­cated to the The­sis framework
• Free­bies — A place where I throw stuff I make for you to down­load. And it’s all free, hence the cre­ative title.
• Young Blog­gers — A weekly series where a new young blog­ger is interviewed.

New Footer, Bet­ter Steroids

I still have the same awe­some footer in effect here (want it?), but it’s amped up a lot. It now spans across the page, holds much more rel­e­vant con­tent and just looks a lot bet­ter overall.

A new fea­ture I added to it is really cool, the smooth scrolling fea­ture. It’s at the very bot­tom right of it, and if you click it, you will go to the top but it will be a much smoother ride if you under­stand what I’m saying.

Con­tent Navigating

I made get­ting to more con­tent a lot eas­ier than before. I decided it would be a lot bet­ter to get rid of all fea­tured posts and set­ting all of my posts to dis­play as teasers. Now, more con­tent can fit on the page and the size of the scroll­bar is slimmer.

I decided to go a lit­tle more mag­a­zine like in the side­bar and put the lat­est post from spe­cific cat­e­gories in the side­bar. I use an incred­i­ble plu­gin by an amaz­ing blog — Lat­est Posts by Cat­e­gory which is just an incred­i­ble plu­gin that is easy to use and style.

Look Around, Stay for a while. Grab the feed

Well, the Patri­ots game is start­ing right about now and I have to go. Rather than writ­ing about every sin­gle thing I did here and why — I think you should go look around the blog. It’s quite easy to get around too, as you will soon find out.

Have fun, and go Pats!

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