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Hello world 2.0! |

Hello world 2.0!

Blimey, it’s been a fair while. How’s everyone been?

As you may or may not have noticed, a couple of things have changed slightly around here. I’ve been hard at work on this for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really happy that it’s finished and online. 😀

A lot’s happened this year. A LOT. I’ve been learning a great deal of new things while working at pixiv, I’ve traveled Japan, I’ve bought and played with some amazing new hardware, and I even took off to California for a week to hang with Google. Oh yeah, and Apple just announced a new version of iOS that turns iComics on its head. ^_^;

And all this time, I’ve been keeping notes on all of this to make them as good blog topics. But sadly, there has been a bit of a “thing” that’s been holding me back somewhat.

The thing holding me back was my old blog theme (Pictured above).

I designed that theme back when I first got it in my head to start a blog, sometime in mid-2008, back when Firefox was the hip cool browser, Chrome was just about to go live, and  Internet Explorer 7 was king of the internet. ^_^;

Needless to say, times have changed since then. Not only has browser technology leaped forward since then (Making things like hand-drawn shadows a thing of the past), but the hardware we consume web content on (ie smartphones and tables) has evolved to an amazing degree.

And whenever I thought about blogging about all of these amazing topics this year, I could’t help but feel ashamed I’d be doing it on theme that was designed for the web 5 years ago (Especially if the post is about design itself). ^_^;

So, after researching the trends of the design of other blogs, and putting together a new design tailored for my own vision of this site, I am now proud to present my re-fitted blog.

It differs from the old blog in quite a few aspects:

  • Professionalism
    My original blog theme was designed with the intention of being really casual and personal. But given the types of posts I’ve ended up writing these days (iComics announcements, iPokédex legal discussions, code techniques etc), I decided the blog needed a much more professional air about it.
  • Much more simplified design
    The old blog design was quite visually chaotic. This new theme does away with all structural graphical elements to portray and very flat, clean design.
  • Removed a lot of the clutter
    You probably don’t need to see my Xbox gamer card, or my Twitter feed, or a break-down of posts by month. This new design strives to only portray the bare minimum of necessary content.
  • No more comments
    I’m still up in the air about this, so I might bring it back. But sadly, even though there are some great comments attached to these topics, for every 1 good comment, there were 3 spam comments trying to promote their wares. Since the majority of people who read my blog follow me on Twitter (or we’re mates on Facebook), I figured I can leave the conversations there instead. (Don’t worry. They haven’t been deleted!)
  • Fully Retina/HiDPI Capable
    After buying a MacBook Pro with Retina Display this year, I’ve pretty much resolved to convert all of my websites over to HiDPI as soon as I can. This new theme is fully HiDPI capable, and all blog posts made from now on will support it as well.
  • Responsive
    As I find maintaining a separate mobile site quite logistically challenging, using the magic of Twitter Bootstrap and a fair bit of testing, this new theme is capable of re-arranging itself to cater for the screen dimensions of any device it is displayed on. 🙂
  • New domain name
    Turns out having to tell everyone there’s a dash in ‘www.tim-oliver.com’ when explaining the URL is kind of annoying. I was absolutely ecstatic when I discovered TimOliver.com.au was still free. And I’ll be making sure it goes to good use. 😀

The blog still needs a little work. Each post has to have a ‘featured’ image inserted into it, and so I’ll be working through that, sorting the posts by priority.

In any case, I’m really happy with this new theme, and I hope you’ll find it a bit easier on the the eyes over the previous one. XD

Have a nice weekend!

  • Published August 3, 2013
  • Categories Personal

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