A clean, fresh look for our little five-year-old!

by on April 24, 2009
in Site News

Decided that BCN deserved a new outfit for her fifth birthday, so I gave the whole blog a lean, clean update with a beautiful peacock-themed logo and coordinating color scheme – hope you like it! (The neat thing is, that peacock is actually the finished tattoo on my left shoulder, which I’ve had since last fall.)

A few changes to the layout of the site will make it even more interactive than before. Most notably, it’s much easier to find the “Comments” link to either read existing comments or post your own comment about everything you read!

Also, I added easily-found links to some of the most popular “sharing” websites at the end of each article, so you can stumble, digg, or tweet anything you wish! (Note: I’m working on a better solution for Twitter, because the code I’m currently using doesn’t automatically shorten the URL of the article you’re sharing. With Twitter’s 140-character-per-message limit, you could easily use up all your characters just with the URL – not good!)

Finally, you can now see “tags” at the end of each article. If you click on a tag, it will show you a list of other articles from elsewhere on the site that relate to that same tag. Right now, the list is a little skimpy – I’ve only tagged a few of the most recent posts, so I’ll have to revisit the older stuff and tag articles individually.

Still to come, I’m planning to clean up the category list so there aren’t so many. It will make the whole page look a lot cleaner, but it will be time-consuming – I’ll have to review every post and re-assign some to other categories. I’ve also got plans for adding occasional guest-posts from other authors, so be on the lookout for some new “biker chick voices” in the months to come!

Thanks as always for reading and participating in this blog – I’m so thankful to have you here!

P.S. – If you’re a WordPress blogger, the theme I’m using here is by Eric Hamm and it’s called Frugal. I love its simplicity and easy customization. Plus, Eric’s the first theme author I’ve ever encountered who a). has created a user’s manual for editing the code in his theme and b). makes me want to stand up and cheer whenever I read his blog.