Finally I had some time to finish my new layout. I have made a couple of changes.

The "Essay of the Week" is a new section. I wanted to give my longer rants a bigger exposure so they don’t "scroll away" so quickly.

I have abandoned the two column layout for a simpler linear approach: first the header with navigation, second the "Essay of the Week", then the normal blog, my ultraorange tweets and at the end the usual elements of the old sidebar (sidenotes,links, tagcloud, categories, recent comments).

Back are the links to fellow bloggers, friends & family.

Some elements and pages are still a bit rough - like the comments under each posting. Some aspects of the typography also have to be fine tuned. But it’s a start.

I got rid of all the social bookmarking gimmicks as well as ratings for individual posts - hardly anyone used them anyway.

Overall I am happy - because I needed to "see" something different. Woman need new shoes - I need new blog layouts.

Let me know what you think!

Instead of blogging something - I finally made the update to WordPress 2.3.1 - which included the usual screaming and shouting when something doesn’t work out of the box. It’s certainly not WP’s fault - it’s just the complexity and fuckups created by plugins and custom made code … after several hours of tweaking and bitching (I hope) everything is working again.

New Tags

Every postings gets now tagged with keywords. I try to keep my usage of keywords consistent. But I haven’t finished crawling through 800+ postings and tagging each one of them. The categories for Classic & Asian Art are done - and I think it’s worth the extra effort, because it allows my readers to browse the blog in new ways.

Under each posting (on the single pages) you find a list of all tags related to that entry. You can click these tags and find related posts.

New Related Posts

In addition to the tags you find also related posts under each entry (on their individual pages). I already implemented that function some time ago - but it didn’t work without proper tagging - but we are slowly getting there …

New Tag Cloud

On the right sidebar you find a nice & trendy tag cloud, which shows you the most used tags. If a keyword is used a lot the tag appears bigger.

My Questions to you

I am just wondering if anyone is missing a search function to dig up certain topics, keywords or entries? I removed it a long time ago - but I am happy to implement it again - IF anyone is using it. So please leave a comment if you want it …

Any other functions you are missing? I always happy to improve my blog! Thanks for your input.

PS: If you like or dislike an entry please do me the honors and rate it by clicking the little star under each postings. I am a slut for feedback!

Update: Found an even better tag cloud plugin with more control. Did some more tagging - which is very time consuming.