DavidGoodman.Net

So I took the chance while updating the backend (again, fucking hell Wordpress, any chance you could find more bugs before you post new versions, so we don’t have to go through the upgrade rigamarole every other week) to fiddle around with the visuals. I’m staying with the simple vibe, but fancied something with nicer typesetting. What do you reckon?

Back in a tick, talk amongst yourselves.

Edit

And we’re done.

I’ve heard a lot of grumbling from people about the new Wordpress backend interface, but personally, I think it’s a piece of genius. Heck, it’s actually got me eager to post, because it’s such a joy to use - the profusion of old tabs is gone, adding media (like the Gears pic in the last post, video or flash music players) is a cinch, and some nice AJAXy/Javascript touches make the whole interface much more slick and web-app like. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of PHP pages hacked together by enthusiastic amateurs anymore - this feels like a professional, easy to use, fun web publishing tool. I’ve been a Wordpress user since the 1.0 days, Blogger before that, and I personally think this marks a really positive change in user inteface design, for Wordpress in particular, but blogging tools in general. The new interface has set a very high bar.

Oh, and auto-saving on posts? SWEET. Never again will a random PHP hiccup eat half an hour’s worth of writing.

Inspired by surfing around FTrain, The Morning News and Kottke, I’ve just reskinned the site, again, because the original theme (Simplr) was a little too simple. It was kind of hard to find your way around the site, so I’ve used a rather nice one called PlainTxtBlog, which is still quite minimalist, but has the basics you need to get around a content-heavy site like this. I’ve also moved an extracted linkblog up to the front page - click the Links page to see the full feed from my del.icio.us links. If you’re a blogger, what are your favourite minimalist themes or site designs?