I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

You know, sometimes my problem is that I over-think things. I make things more complicated than they need to be. Such was the problem with this site’s re-design. For almost a year I was trying to come up with a complex solution, when honestly, something simple was what I needed all along. And I knew that inside, I was just too stubborn to admit it. (another of my faults, lol) After my 4th attempt, I said to myself, “Ok, you’re a minimalist at heart. Keep it simple. What is it you absolutely MUST have in this new design? Throw everything else out.” I didn’t know. So I searched for ideas, inspiration, anything that said “Yeah, that’s it. That’s what I want!” I looked at responsive designs … and hated them all. I looked at a lot of newer HTML5 sites, and hated most of them. Nothing looked the type of functionality and flow I wanted to have. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but nothing I saw felt like “me” and everything I came up with on my own just didn’t feel right.

I saw red

I stumbled upon CSSHeaven’s site by chance and immediately noticed his CleanRed design. It was actually pretty close to my first re-design attempt, but had more elegantly ported to HTML5 format. I downloaded his template and was surprised by how small and light it was. Mine was too complex, so I scrapped it in favor of CleanRed as a base. I liked the color scheme well enough to keep it — after all, I *DO* love red! ;) It took me a bit of time to add the WordPress functionalities, as my much older template still in use at the time contained a lot of WordPress functions that had since been replaced. And who knows how long until those calls were deprecated? So that meant more catching up on what I’d missed as far as HTML5 and the newer WordPress hooks and functions.

It took far longer than I had originally wanted, but I’m very happy with the results over all. I had a sandbox site set up and tested it for a couple of months, so there’s still the possibility of things I’ve missed. And I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it here and there for the next couple weeks or so, but everything should be stable enough. But please PLEASE let me know if anything’s wonky or amiss. :)

New comment system

If you haven’t noticed already, I have dumped the native WordPress comment functionality in favor of Disqus. I have been using it on a couple small Blogger blogs as well as a handful of my Tumblr blogs and love it. It’s easy to setup and moderate, and its integration into WordPress was so much simpler than the comment re-write mess I had been struggling with. I was trying to re-invent the wheel. After moderating a few comments on Daevic Flux one day it hit me — this app is so easy, why not use it on my own damned site?

I haven’t experienced any issues using it on my gaming blogs nor Bruce’s blog. You have the choice of signing in with a number of services, or just use your own name and email address as you did here previously with the old WordPress comment system. If you have any issues, please please PLEASE let me know. Disqus’ tech support has been great and I’m sure they’ll be quick to help me with any issues experienced on this platform as they have with my other blogs.