I will admit to being bored to death with the options available for redesigning BLDGBLOG on the Blogger platform; with the 7-year anniversary of this site passing just last week—go, little blog, go!—I am more than ready to redesign it, swap platforms altogether, and otherwise change just about everything there is to change here behind the scenes. Instead, I've somewhat lazily tweaked a few random details—such as post titles—and I've foregrounded the "News" section in the righthand column, but whoopee: that's not much to get excited about.
Nonetheless, I wanted to throw up a quick post: I've cut the infinite list of "Previous Posts" on the right, I've moved the "News" section up so that those links are now more visible, and I've altered some of the spacing and column widths. If you notice anything egregiously wrong, let me know.
Finally, it's been a slow summer for posts, as I'm working on the Landscape Futures exhibition and its accompanying book; I'm moving to New York City in a few weeks, so we've been busy house-hunting; and I've been on the road for most of the past two months. But the pace will be ramping up again here, with some cool news coming soon. Until then, I can also be found on Twitter.
Nonetheless, I wanted to throw up a quick post: I've cut the infinite list of "Previous Posts" on the right, I've moved the "News" section up so that those links are now more visible, and I've altered some of the spacing and column widths. If you notice anything egregiously wrong, let me know.
Finally, it's been a slow summer for posts, as I'm working on the Landscape Futures exhibition and its accompanying book; I'm moving to New York City in a few weeks, so we've been busy house-hunting; and I've been on the road for most of the past two months. But the pace will be ramping up again here, with some cool news coming soon. Until then, I can also be found on Twitter.
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We jumped ship when Blogger dropped support for self-hosted blogs last year. While the transition to (self-hosted) WordPress was more than a little intimidating and left me scratching my head a few times, I love it!
I quite like the fact that the blog is on blogger all these years.
I was actually planning a self-hosted blog myself recently and am now thinking I'll rather go for blogger, as endless wordpress updates and hosting issues can be a pain. If you wanted to make it look less like blogger you could remove the topbar area, and use a custom domain name perhaps.
I'm not sure about the right aligned titles - looks a bit odd. left align I would think would be better.
Paragraph text perhaps has a little bit too much line spacing.
It seems that some images are coming in only 1 pixel high...related to the tweaking?
True,you could jump ship but bldgblog.blogspot is such a great URL.
Honestly, I'm still stuck on the fence about leaving for a new platform (and, thus, a new URL). We'll see what happens, I guess. Thanks for the tips/suggestions, in the meantime.
Anonymous, vis-a-vis the 1px-high images that you're referring to, are the images fixed now or is it a very widespread problem? I'm not seeing it here on Safari or Firefox, although I think I know what the problem is.
Thanks!
Congrats with the 7 years! Bldgblog is one of the few blogs which make me go 'Jeay, new post!'.
Well you can have custom domains with blogger - so just maybe do that for a while if you are deciding to move anyway. Either would work then.
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&ts=1233381
Do what you will with the layout. My brain kicks down a little bit more of its walls every time I go to bldgblog. Nothing else drives me to the studio like this blog.
Wordpress. I've built a couple sites from them using templates (or writing my own) and it's just great. You will need some technical know-how or a hired data-monkey to get it going but once it's running it's a joy to blog from.
There's plenty of help available on their website (the wordpress.org site for self-hosting) to guide you through the process and many webhosts offer one-click installs.
When I switched my own site I was able to import all my blogger.com posts.
Plus tons of free, awesome themes: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/05/free-wordpress-themes-2011-edition/ many of the nicer themes are customizable through the admin interface.
A couple of the pictures in the Situationist Drawing Device post are still 1 pixel high. I'm using Explorer; I know, I know, but lots of people use it...
love,
previous Anon
Anon, thanks for checking the images again, I think I've fixed all of them. Annoyingly, I have to manually enter the height of all my images, because if that field is left blank—and it doesn't autofill—IE resizes them as 1px high. Something else to love about Blogger, I guess...
Saintneko, cheers, I will take a look at those themes. I'm still on the fence about the switch to Wordpress.
And thanks, Paul T, Alicebob, I appreciate the encouragement! To be honest, it's been a year of near-constant negative feedback and I'm tired of it; it's good to hear I'm not just writing this thing for myself these days. Thanks again.
Anyway, the layout will probably continue to shift around here and there for the next two or three weeks as I muck about with various things, so let me know if something particularly awful happens.
Remember - you don't want to make it too slick so people will buy book 2 ;)
I'll have to try to remember to be more vocal with praise, because BLDGBLOG is still one of my favorites. Don't get discouraged!
Anon, I apologize—that wasn't a call for praise!
Well, but you deserve it. Whether you call for it or not!
The titles of posts are also appearing as "(title unknown)" in google reader since the update.
Strange.
bk, is that true for all titles, or only for the ones that don't actually have titles (such as the one we're now commenting on)?
Best to title every post. helps for instapaper and later kindle reading as well.
Move to Tumblr.
I'd avoid tumblr - I had a blog on it for a while and I found it just didn't get indexed by google. I've heard this also from other tumblr bloggers who try to put up text content rather than image blogs it tends to get used for. For text content I think wordpress or blogger is far more stable.
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