It’s been a (long) while since I have posted. Certainly the times of blogging once a day are a blip on the horizon in the rearview mirror. But, I’m feeling quite freshened in the new year and so you’ll probably hear from me a little bit more again in the coming weeks and months. To help with that, I’ve made a rather more significant change to the blog recently, with the help of the guys from Tweaky. Here’s what I’ve done.
I’ve Changed to WordPress.com
I work at Yammer, where we almost religiously believe in the value of a multi-tenant cloud service. You can read a little more about our product development methods here. I’ve come to realise that I’m never going to keep up with the pace of change and improvement that’s happening here on WordPress.com, even with WordPress.org. WordPress.com also solves the mobile issue. This blog is now very easy to read on any device. Magic!
The platform here is going to continue getting better and better, and all I have to do now is make sure I pay WordPress.com my bill, and write content. It’s already gone through a significant improvement since I moved my old Wordpres.org blog over about a month ago. It’s very freeing to now be able to just write, and not worry subconsciously that it’s up to me to install an update or something like that.
I used Tweaky to help me move the blog
My old blog was actually still sitting on an old server of Ross’s, which he was deprecating. With the decision to move to WordPress.com made, I now needed someone to help me move the old blog over to WordPress.com. I got in touch with Tweaky and went through their process, which was awesome.
I set up the new WordPress.com site, and bought the appropriate bundles. I selected this theme and then posted them a couple of tweaks to move the domain over and apply a couple of my own custom trimmings to the look of the new blog. You can see a screenshot of the service here. It really is fantastic, I recommend you use them if you need to do any design or tech related stuff to your digital places.
The new theme
I selected this theme with a couple of things in mind. I wanted something that was going to be very simple to navigate, which I think this is. Everything you need is in the footer and even though that can take some scrolling, it’s great on each individual post – which is really how most people navigate to this blog.
I also wanted something with an obvious archive, as that was one thing people told me needed including after the last redesign.
Finally, I wanted the ability for people to subscribe by email to remain prominent. This is where one of the tweaks came in – I asked the guys to create a hot pink call out around the subscribe box, to make that a little bit more obvious.
I really liked the simple structure of the new set up, and am already really enjoying getting back into thinking about just writing more here. Thanks for reading along! See you throughout 2013.
The Squiggly Line 