Two Major Updates

(this post was written by Kyle on January 25, 2007, and it concerns & & )

Good afternoon, everybody. I want to give you all an update on a couple of major changes that we made today.

New Theme

The first is obvious. We’ve updated our theme again. We’ve updated it for two reasons. First, because you requested it a couple of weeks back using the polling widget in our sidebar (which, you’ll notice, is now under the “Asides”); and second, because some users (specifically, those using Internet Explorer) had issues with the way our previous theme constructed the three columns: instead of getting three columns, they got two, and everything that was supposed to be in the third one got stuck underneath the first, which made a REALLY long and REALLY ugly column.

For those who are interested in this kind of stuff, the new theme we’re using is called October Special, and it was created by Derek Punsalen over at 5thirtyone.com.

There’s are two things about this theme that I want to point out:

  1. The front page is now divided into two vertical sections, the upper section with a white background and the lower section with a darker one. The white background is for the latest post and the most commonly used widgets (more on this in a moment). The dark background is for the previous five posts, the less commonly used widgets, and a list of every category on Fluid Imagination.
  2. The three columns have changed. In the left hand column, you’ll find all the information related to the post in the center column, information such as when the post was published, who wrote it, where it was categorized, how it was tagged, and how many comments belong to it. In the right hand colum, are ALL the widgets.

Now, as far as the sidebar widgets go, the ones you see today may be in flux for a while. Because the last theme had two widget sidebars, we filled them up with a lot of neat things that don’t seem to fit into the new model, things such as a bunch of Flickr photos, a list of what books I’m reading, and a list of what songs I recently listened to. Furthermore, because the two places for sidebars are now distributed vertically (some on the white background, some on the dark), we may run into some issues when it comes to the top sidebar running longer than the top post, which leaves us with a bunch of white space between the end of the post and the start of the lower section, and that could get kind of annoying, especially when you want to look at the comments for a post, and you have to scroll a bunch just because the sidebar is too damn long.

The solution to this, of course, is to make the top sidebar relatively short. Which brings us to a question that I need you all to answer. What is the most important widget in your mind (i.e., which widget interests you the most)? Here’s the list of all the widgets we have installed on Fluid Imagination:

  • Recent Comments
  • Asides
  • Democracy Poll
  • Most Popular Tags
  • Top Commenters
  • Kyle’s Status
  • Kyle’s Reading List
  • Kyle’s Recent Tracks
  • Kyle’s Flickr Photos

Personally, I could go with any of the top three. Recent Comments are obviously important, since Fluid Imagination is a community and this widget shows us what’s happening in the community. But I can also see putting them as the first widget in the lower section, since all the commenting takes place down there, in which case, I see the Asides most deserving of the upper section, i.e., the white background is for reading, the dark background is for talking. As for my reasoning regarding putting the poll in the top spot, it would be because that is the place (besides when you contribute posts) where you all have the opportunity to shape the site’s future, and putting it in the bottom section is almost like hiding it from view, putting power into the hands of those few who scroll down and look for it.

Honestly though, I can go for whatever you guys want, so leave a comment and let me know which widget you think belongs in the top slot.

WordPress 2.1

The second major update is that we’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.1, codename: Ella (after Ella Fitzgerald). Most readers won’t notice a difference, but those of you who contribute will see some changes in the backend. First (and most important), it’s got an autosave feature now. When you’re writing your post, WordPress will now automatically save it like every minute or so, which means you no longer have to worry about accidentally losing any of your hard work. Other changes include some AJAXy goodness that will make my job as webmaster a lot faster and smoother, an update to Akismet (9,377 SPAM comments caught since I first installed it!), and a bunch of other things, including 550+ bug fixes.

So, that’s what we’ve done today on Fluid Imagination. I want to thank Adam for helping me with a couple of the early decisions, and implore you to please leave a comment with any feedback at all, and especially with what widget you want to see in the top section.

Thanks everybody.