Finally after months of planning I am finally ready to put my new blog design up live, I have been working hard on this design over the past few weeks. I first said back in March (2010) of this year that I wanted to make a new design. I had initially intended to get it ready for an April launch but I just wasn’t happy with anything.

I ended up postponing the design every month, I must of gone through about 4 design before I finally gave up and decided to just build one from scratch!

So the new theme is simple, extremely simple, it consists of about four colours which are blue, grey, black and white, blue and white being the most prominent.

So until tomorrow I will just show you my logo, I decided that I was happy with the one I already have, I didn’t see a point in changing it, instead I worked on changing it to suit my new colour scheme, after all the current colour, green, would stand out like a sore thumb in the new design!

Below is my new logo, I think it looks well.

The new theme will be fully live tomorrow, I will most likely begin upgrading my blog tonight to it. I notice that everything on this blog seems to run slow, so I have decided, out with the old and in with the new, starting fresh.

Later tonight, my blog will go into maintenance mode where I will be deleting my current WordPress installation which includes all plugins, themes and files from the  server and starting it all over again, I will backup everything, and all that will be back with the new design is, necessary plugins, and all of my blog posts!

Oh and I will be adding an extra blog post tomorrow, just to go through what I have changed

Image via Wikipedia

Over the past few weeks I have been working very hard on my theme for this blog and I am definitely making a lot of progress on it. I have always been familiar with CSS but not completely comfortable with it.

Over the weeks that I have been working on the theme, I have had to come to grip with a lot of CSS work, and CSS is now becoming second nature to me. I know this is something I should already know the in’s and out’s of by now, but I really just use what I need to get the design done.

I have now learned a lot of new CSS tags that I never knew existed!

Tonight I spent a lot of time designing my comments section for my new design, I know that it is an important part to a blog so I wanted to get it right. I have fully implemented my colour choice that I used in the rest of my theme and I also incorporated Gravatars into the comments section, I know I already have these in my current theme, but these were not in my new theme until tonight.

I have also introduced nested comments into the new design, this is completely new to my blog. I think this will be very useful as some of my posts do receive a lot of comments and with having nested comments it allows for people to reply to other comments and it will stand out that there is a reply to it whereas before all the comments were clumped together and were a little harder to distinguish between.

So now all that remains on my new theme is a few minor tweaks and my logo and then it will be complete and I can finally release it and hopefully receive some honest criticism on it .

It turns out that Eircom have completed installing their new NGB (Next Generation Broadband) service here in Dundalk, and I hand even realised it

I rang up Eircom support earlier this week to tell them that when I finally got switched over to their new service that I wanted to be put on the higher “Unlimited” ( in reality it is a 250gb limit, fair usage, which is still great) package, they then informed me that it was already available and I had indeed already been switched over to the NGB.

Luckily I rang up to get my package switched then, otherwise I would of been paying through the nose for my broadband! After I got off the phone I went online to see when exactly the Dundalk exchange had been switched over and it was upgraded on September 30th and October 1st.

I actually do remember the internet disconnecting at midnight on September 30th because that was the day I was launching the eclips hair salon website and of all times for the site to go down it was when I was putting a site up online!

The Eircom site states that there would of been a disruption for about and an hour so it is my fault for not realizing that!

Eircom have a list of set dates when they are upgrading their exchange points on their website so you can check it there, if you were wondering!

I was also told that since my line cannot support more than 3mb of speed that I will not be able to take full advantage of NGB, however what I do benefit from is the consistency of my broadband speed now. Even though I only have 3mb, it would be very rare I would see anything over 2mb, usually I would get 1.5 on average, sometime worse, the best speed was always in the early hours of the morning.

Now however with NGB the contention ratio is gone so no more line sharing apparently, I have noticed the difference, I now get a solid 2.75mb at all times including peak times such as 1pm to 2pm and 6pm to 7pm! It’s great, I only wish I could get the full 8mb, maybe Eircom will pull the finger out and sort that one out!

When I was on the Eircom site checking out the exchange upgrade dates I noticed there is a download usage meter that you can get for your computer which show how much traffic you have used for the month, extremely handy if you are on one of the lower NGB packages, but for me on the unlimited bundle, it is just a novelty and some extra statistics for me!