As you may or may not have noticed (Hi, RSS readers!), I redesigned my website. As this change comes shortly after the first of the year, I think I’m obligated to write something to the effect of: “I’ve got a new look for a new year.” So…yeah. Consider that done.
P&P has needed this for awhile now. The old setup was clunky, loaded slowly, and was starting to have some really odd presentation issues. For example, for the last 9 months or so, when I logged into the admin account, the left and right sidebars would both load on the right side of the browser. It looked really stupid. Hopefully it was just me, as the admin, who saw it.
As rough as the old layout had become, though, it was a labor of love. I worked on it for two entire months, consulted with dozens of people, and modified it so heavily that I don’t think the original creator of the theme I used would even have been able to recognize it. This setup is much less fancy. It’s just the current default wordpress theme, with about 3 days of tinkering thrown on top of it. But there are significant improvements. Much more space for content, much faster loading times, and I’ve finally got a pretty solid search function! That’s exciting. I should also be able to get a nice navigation menu set up within a few weeks.
I hope you like it. Let me know if you’re having any issues. And just in case you’re wondering: no, it is not lost on me that my first post in several weeks has absolutely nothing to do with tabletop games. I’ll fix that too.
Hey, it looks very nice!
Nicely done!
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A RSS Reader 😛
Very glad you think so, thanks!
Keepin it classy!
I think the current content width is a bit too wide. The way it is, individual lines are getting rather long, which on a screen isn’t thatgood to read. A narrower colum of text is a lot easier on the eyes.
That’s funny, a large part of the appeal this layout had for me was the larger content space it afforded. But I do see your point.
I wonder how ridiculously difficult it would be to set up a classic two-column page layout within a post’s content area.
Broken on iPhone
Yeah, I was told the same thing by someone else this morning. I’m going to see what I can do about it, though testing is difficult because I don’t have a smartphone myself.
Lookin’ good, LS! I was worried you mighta dropped off the map or something, since I hadn’t seen any posts in the last few weeks’ time.
Glad you’re still around, too! 😀
While I never saw the old layout (just found the blog in the last few days) I do think this one looks good for the most part. Though it seems in some articles with images set to the left of the text are being cut off by the sidebar. The most recent with such an image alignment is the 2nd annual survey result (August ’13), but it appears to be perfectly fine. But the next one, the 2nd annual survey announcement post, is off. While the 3rd (July 29th) and 4th (May 28th) most recent (An image macro of a teacher from Hogwarts and the vendor Saving throw article) are also off center. The 5th (May 20th) most recent (the 1 hour dungeon) is fine however. Though this could all very well simply be the result of any number of variables of settings in my setup I may or may not know of.
Sorry if that was a bit haphazard, I filled it in as I went through pages for examples. Regardless, I’ve still enjoyed all of your insightful and amusing writings. Keep up the good work. ^.^
I’m glad you’ve been enjoying yourself here! This blog hasn’t been receiving as much attention lately, so it’s good to know there are people still finding and reading it.
Thanks for the heads up on the left-aligned images. I was aware it might happen, so before I launched the site I went back to the most recent left-aligned image, and discovered that it was perfectly fine. So, of course, I foolishly assumed the rest of them would be fine as well.
It’s on my list of things to take care of, but with a bit of a lower priority than the work I’m doing to set up a better post navigation.
Hi. One word: hyperlink-preservation
Okay those are two words.
But it’s very important to preserve your URLs through website rehauls, because right now links and bookmarks to old categories don’t work anymore 🙁 You’ve replaced them with tags I think? And not replaced them all, for instance https://www.paperspencils.com/category/system-independant throws a Not found page.
It will not score nicely with search engines either.
Anyway, keep up the good work! I like your blog and I hope you can work around old URLs. 🙂
Thanks for the tip. I hadn’t considered that, and it’s good to know.
Most links should be correctly preserved, it’s just the categories I got rid of. And, (though I may be wrong), I don’t recall ever linking to the categories. I suppose others may have, but what can you do?
Either way, it was necessary. The categories were bad, and I’ve got a much better use for them which I’m currently working on. It’s just taking awhile since I need to manually add new categories to every post I’ve ever made.
Thanks LS!
I selfishly hope you add the system-independant tag/category because it was most useful to me. 🙂
Keep up the good work.
Good to know. There probably won’t be a specific “system independent” category, but I think what I’m working on should be able to serve the same purpose.
You’ll have to let me know once I’ve got it going. Sorry if I messed up your read-through of that category!