New Appearance

If you look at D4D™ on the site, rather than through an RSS reader, you’ll have already noticed I’ve put a new theme on the site for the time being.

There’s no real reason for it, I just fancied a bit of a change.  There’s been a lot of change this year for me, which has also come through onto D4D (for obvious reasons) so it felt like I should change things here visually too. Besides, it’s been the existing theme for a very long time now, so time for a bit of an update.

It may also be the indicator of a new mode for D4D™, I don’t know yet. We’ll see.


Belated Birthday

Buggeration. I’ve just realised that I missed D4D™’s 7th birthday, back on the 9th August.

I’m normally pretty good at pointing out birthdays on here, so I’m quite surprised (and somewhat annoyed) that I failed to mention this one.

It’s also made me realise that all the stuff I had done for custom headers etc. on certain days has gone by the by since the redesign as well. So that’s something I need to work on a bit when I get the chance. (And I wonder if I’ve still got the list of dates somewhere. Hope so!)

But anyway, wow – D4D™’s been going seven years now. That’s pretty good going.

And Happy Belated Birthday, little D4D™.  Long may you continue.


Analytics

Damn, knew I’d forgotten something with all the redesign stuff that’s been going on here.  And I’ve just discovered what that something was.

Google Analytics.

So for the last four days, according to Analytics no-one had visited D4D™ at all.  Ooops.

It’s all fixed now – but all the same, a pain in the backside.


Yeah, different again

OK, so I’ve made a decision following on from a couple of posts over the weekend re style/colouration etc.

And yes, before anyone chimes in with it, this is one of the benefits with using WordPress – shedloads of templates that are available and lovely.

With some hindsight, there were some things I wasn’t happy about with the FluidYellowBlack (FYB) template, although it fitted fine under “that’ll do”. And having re-looked on the dev version of D4D, and trying out a different template instead of FYB, I found myself liking it more and more.

So three days after relaunch/redesign 1, welcome to the new redesign 2. Not so much a redesign as a different template, in fairness – but I’m pretty sure I prefer this one, all things considered.

No, it still doesn’t have much of a connection to the full D4D name – but this one feels more like me, for some reason I haven’t yet ascertained.

Enjoy.


Colour Scheme

Following on from a conversation via Twitter on Friday, I’m wondering about the colour-scheme and design here. I know, go through a redesign and migration (and organisation) and suddenly I want to do another one. Live with it.

The fact is, it took me ages to find a template with a significant dollop of yellow in it – obviously yellow isn’t all that popular when it comes to designs.

Those with long memories will know that D4D™ was initially called “Destruction For Dummies” rather than “Dummies for Destruction”, and the initial design (if I can call it that) was based on the “For Dummies” range of books. Then I got that ‘cease and desist’ email from Wileys telling me that “[Anything] For Dummies” was part of their trademark. So the name changed (but stayed as D4D) and here I’ve been since. And the yellow’s stayed too.

Of course, with the new template I don’t need to have the rubbish with the colour switcher. But I do wonder whether I should screw about even more, and possibly change the appearance of D4D™ beyond all recognition from the old version.

I don’t know yet. We’ll see.

And of course if you’ve got any views, let me know in the comments, yeah?


Missing Pages

As part of D4D moving hosts, I haven’t yet copied over the non-blog pages. In truth, I don’t kow that I will do.  A lot of the D4D site consists/ed of pages that were no longer maintained or used any more, and were just taking up space.

I don’t know whether any of the pages were massively in use (Yes, I should’ve done a proper check before just removing them, but well, I didn’t) but I’ll keep an eye on the site error logs and see whether it’s worth copying any of it over.

Time will tell, I know – but for now there’s just going to be the main blog part here, and then from there we’ll see how it goes.


Blogroll

As part of the redesign here, I’ve also had a quick run-through of the blog-roll over there on the right, and culled a few I no longer read, or who no longer update.

It’s interesting seeing how things change – and adding new bits and bobs to the sidebars that now exist – and keeping everything a bit more up to date.

I’m sure I’ll add in a few more over time – there’s a couple of new additions in there already – but for now it’s enough to just be up to date.