A new look for my blog

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 29th, 2011 | 0 Comments

I have been working on my new look for this blog for some time now, a few weeks back i put a rougher version of this theme live, just to see how it looked with all my pages and widgets in the sidebar. It wasn't working the way i liked and i had a few issues with some plugins that wouldn't work with the new theme. Since i was having so many issues from the new theme i put back up my old one just while i made some tweaks to the new theme. I have another website set up where i test my new themes i am working on, so that was the environment i used to make the changes that were needed. The new design for my blog is not one i made myself, instead i decided to buy one from ThemeForest, i wanted to have a  pre-made template which i could modify to the way i needed it to be. The theme i bought was $35 and is called Presenter WP. It is a really nice theme and is mainly aimed towards business site. I bought it for its simple look and also for some of the features which it has that enhances how posts look such as bullet points etc.

A nice feature which it has built in is a portfolio section. I have yet to include a portfolio on this blog, i do already have a portfolio with some of my work in it, but it is an entirely different site than my blog, i had thrown a link into my nav bar above to that site, but i have since removed it because it was external. I feel that all my links in my navigation bar should be internal only! I have wanted to get my portfolio better integrated into my blog for a while now and i will be working on this over the coming weeks. A huge change, at least in my opinion, that i have made to my blog is the change in colour and logo. My blog originally had a dark look to it when i first started, it was a grim looking black with my green logo, i then changed it to a very naked looking blog with a lot of white, a simple blue bar and a blue version of the original blue logo. With this new blog design i have changed things up a lot, and i feel it looks better. There is still the easy on the eyes look to the te, the main content area is white and the text font looks good. The main change to the design side is the light blue background i have added into the site, its not too dark or bright that it distracts you from what i want people to look at, the content! The other big change which i have made to the design is my logo. For a few years i have always used my original logo which i had made for me a few years ago, it was used in all my blog designs since i started  blogging! The orignal logo can be seen below.

I always liked this logo, but after going through so many changes here on my blog i feel it has become a little outdated and  i wanted to make a fresh new logo that would compliment my new blog design. Since this first logo i have come from not knowing how to use photoshop at all to now where i can understand everything i need and i have the ability to find out how to do what i want if need be. That was the main reason i originally bought the logo above, simply because i didnt know how to use photoshop! Now though i refuse to pay for a logo, the logo is something that really ties a site together, and is sometimes the only image on a site, so it is important it looks how you want it. I spent hours in photoshop trying to come up with a new logo, i made dozens of new logos, but none that i felt would fit this blog. Finally i ended up with the new logo which i have live now!

I also changed how my photos are displayed form flickr on this site, they used to show all my albums, but now they show a continuous stream of all my images, straight from flickr just like they would appear on flickr if you were looking at my photostream, they also have a nice lightbox effect.  I still have a few more changes to make to my blog. I still need to get my search box back into the sidebar and i want to get the links for seeing more blog posts on the front page working again.

May 2010 Review

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 20th, 2010 | 0 Comments

It has been a while since I last made a review post on how my blog is currently doing in relation to my work rate and what kind of traffic I am receiving. This review is for last month (May 2010). May this year was definitely a great month for me, I had been steadily building up my blog postings back to my old method of posting one a day and last month, May, I finally reached a posting rate which I am really happy with. Last month I made 26 blog postings, which is really good considering there is 31 days in May so I only missed out on 5 days in the whole month! :D Last month was my exams in college, and although I was studying away I made a good effort to get a blog post made each night. Here is a list of all of last month's blog posts:

31: Challenge begins tomorrow 30: my weekend, and the Turkish grand prix 29: a good web series 28: Brushing up on photoshop 27: newmovies.ie, where is it gone! 26: Clean slate 25: work begins on my new theme 24: and the weather continues 23: facebook Ahoy! 22: Really hot weather 21: No internet, and Google pacman 20: Finished my exams 19: Tomorrows exam 18: Three down, one to go 17: Setting myself a challenge 16: Monaco, what a race! 15: Online plans for the summer 14: Whats that song called? 13: Half way there 12: Now I have a bill phone 11: Started my exams today 09: Spanish Grand Prix – Can’t believe it 08: Marina and the Diamonds 07: Making a few changes 06: Google – A change in design 05: Exams approaching

Traffic to my blog last month has also been incredible, my traffic had dipped slightly towards the end of April, which was probably due to my lack of posts, but by making my regular posts last month I managed to bring my visitor count back up. Last month (May 2010) my blog received 12,161 unique visits with a total of 13,869 page views.  Not bad! If I compare this year's May traffic to last year's May (2009) traffic, there is a significant increase, last year I received 2,139 unique visits in May, so this year there was a 468.54% increase in traffic! So I am really happy with the way my blog is growing and hopefully I can keep up with the blog posts :D. I have also noticed that my RSS subscribers have also increased a lot since last year, last year I recall only having about one RSS Subscriber, but now I have about 37 on average each month, not bad! Maybe over the next few weeks I might be able to increase this count. I don't really have it too easy to subscribe to my RSS either so I will have to work on that! Maybe I will incorporate it into my new theme I am working on, if I ever get it finished! So for now I will list two ways that you can subscribe to my RSS feed, these two methods are either subscribing through a RSS reader such as Google Reader or you can subscribe by e-mail (by subscribing by e-mail, all my latest blog posts will be e-mailed to you between 11pm and 1 am GMT each day!). Just choose one of the options below! :D

Click here to subscribe to my RSS via a Reader

Click here to subscribe to my RSS via E-mail

Another thing I wanted to point out is what browsers my visitors use, the most popular one is Firefox! Which is great, just over 41% of my visitors use Firefox, the next most popular is Internet Explorer (if you use this I recommend you switch to either Firefox or Google Chrome), Internet Explorer makes up just over 36% of my visitors and then the third largest internet browser visitors use is Google Chrome which makes up just over 18% of the visitors.

Tweaks

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 13th, 2008 | 0 Comments

Over the past few days i have been tweaking my website, trying to get everything back to the way it was, i have managed to do this but i could not fix my rss feed, it would not work for me. Everytime you would click the rss feed it said invalid, then when i tried setting it up on feedburner it told me that my website URL did not exist, but obviously it did because it was working.

So after a while i thought that maybe something might have gone wrong with the installation that lunarpages done when they installed Wordpress onto this blog, so i still had the files from wordpress on my old server so i decided to copy some of them over to this server, so the folder i decided to replace on this server was called wp_includes, so i began to transfer the files over which took a while, while i was transferring the files over my website went down because of syntax errors, but i let the transfer finish and when it finished my website went back up so i was happy it went back, and by replacing that folder with the old one i managed to get my rss to work again i went over to feedburner and signed the rss feed on my website up and it worked perfectly so i am happy with that.

Sign up to my blog's rss feed by clicking the rss feed button in the right column or click the link below.