Blog Redesign

in pro­pria per­sona has been on tem­po­rary hia­tus for a week or two while I fin­ished finals and worked on my law review com­pe­ti­tion entry (due on Tuesday). Since this involved con­sid­er­able men­tal energy, I’ve kept myself amused through a blog redesign. (Notes from Law School will be keep­ing the old design for the time being.)

Of note in the new design:

• An updated color scheme blended with Blogger’s top bar.
• 3-column lay­out pro­vided by Yahoo! UI Grids.
• A main col­umn with blog entries that includes use­ful tools at the bot­tom of each post to add to var­i­ous online ser­vices (Digg, etc.), plus some FeedBurner FeedFlares (such as Sphere’s related content).
• Small mid­dle col­umn fea­tur­ing a vari­ety of adver­tis­ers (if I am to advise peo­ple on the use of these net­works, I need to use them myself). This col­umn starts out faded to keep it less obtru­sive, then becomes more vis­i­ble when moused over.
• The far right col­umn has var­i­ous blog tools, includ­ing search (two vari­eties, one Google based, one Blogger based), entry cat­e­gories, Technorati links, Google sug­ges­tions, and MyBlogLog entries.

I have reduced the Snap pre­views and elim­i­nated MyWire feeds for the time being, since I felt they were adding dis­trac­tions with­out suf­fi­cient value. I am still using Snap, but in a less obtru­sive way (icons only, and essen­tially only on posts). In addi­tion, the Yahoo! menu bar I had across the top has been removed, at least tem­porar­ily. I may look to inte­grate a more tab-based menu later.

Of course, I will be tweak­ing this design going for­ward, look­ing for more fea­tures to improve con­nec­tions between my post­ings and other resources on the Web, improve usabil­ity of my blog, and learn (and share) new tools and technologies.