Redesign #3 for Techory.com

You may have noticed that things have changed a bit around here. I’ve been working on a new design off and on for a couple months now, and have finally gotten to a point where it is “done enough” to implement. As these things go, it will probably never be “done.” In this new design, there are a few new areas and features that I didn’t have previously that I want to point out.

Photos
Photos aren’t really a new feature. I’ve always had a photo gallery on the site. I’ve decided to use a different gallery application, ZenPhoto, instead of Coppermine which I used previously. This new gallery is a little nicer to use, and allows me to finally turn comments back on for photos. This is something I used to have, but was so overwhelmed by spam that I had to remove it. So feel free to leave photo comments (especially on the mobile photos) whenever you see fit.

Blog Sidebar
This area is pretty much the same as I’ve as I’ve always had in the sidebar. Its information specific to the blog: search, blogroll/links, post archives, etc.

Social Sidebar
The Social Sidebar is mainly a collection of my interactions with social sites outside of techory. Some are fleshed out, and pull content directly in, and some are just links to my profiles on those sites.

• The “Latest Mobile Photo” isn’t a new feature, but comments are turned back on for those photos (see above)
• Twitter now lives in the sidebar. I’ve got a twitter account, so I figured why not bring it into my blog as well. You can see my last two tweets on the site, as well as follow the link to my twitter account and follow me if you’d like.
• Shared links is something totally new. I run across a lot of intersting links on a pretty regular basis, and unless you follow me on the various social bookmarking sites I use, you can’t see what weird and wonderful sites I find interesting. I’ve brought all my submissions to those social bookmarking sites together into that sidebar (and the payoff page for shared links archives) as a place to see what I run across out on the Internets.
• Flickr is the next in line, and is a link I’ve always had in my sidebar, but just called out a bit more. It now includes the latest two photos that I’ve posted to flickr.
• At the bottom of the Social Sidebar, I have included links to my social networking profiles. Again, these area areas I interact with on other social sites, so I decided to hook those into techory as well.

So there you have it, what’s new and cool with the new design. I’m sure there are still some rough edges on this, and I’ll be going over things with a fine-toothed comb the next few weeks. Let me know if you noticed anything flakey happening, or anything I missed.