Changes, Changes, Changes – Part II

Oh the excitement! It looks like the new upgrade of the blog template over at https://www.elsua.net has been a total hit! Plenty of folks have dropped by the launch entry, as well as through Twitter, to comment on how much better the new design is, compared to the old one, and although I am sure the other two blogs I maintain will keep the same flavour they have been having I can surely guarantee you it is quite a rush receiving all of the positive commentary and quite motivating to keep things going with some more regular blogging. And since we are starting another year, why not, right?

Well, here I am again then, putting together a follow up blog post to the one from yesterday where I will be commenting further on some of the various different changes that will be taking place over at elsua.net and which, in a way, will also affect to some extent how I will keep things going with all of the blogs I currently look after.

Thus without much further ado, here is a short list of the new things you will be able to find at my main person / business blog:

• About: This is where folks can find a recent photo of what I look like (Ideal when meeting up face to face!), but also a description of who I am, what I do, what I like and what people can expect from the blog. And, finally the opportunity now to leave comments with whatever you may have in mind that you feel would need / require my attention. Whenever people may not be able to reach out to me through IM, Twitter, Facebook or whatever other social networking site, this would be the area to drop by and leave a comment. You see? I didn’t mention email 😉
• Archives: One of the sections I am most excited about and which I was really looking forward to finally have it as part of the blog. A lovely, and nifty, index of the over 866 blog posts I have put together in elsua.net, so if you are looking for something I may have blogged about in the past you will be able to find it through there much easier! Oh, and the Search function now works, too!
• Links: For a good number of months I was using a blogroll injected directly from BlogLines, where folks could check out some of the current reading I was doing. But then things got messy and I eventually had to take it down. However, since plenty of folks have been asking me about it again in the recent weeks I thought it would be nice to recover it and that’s why under Links you will find my current blogroll of over 270 feeds, because, yes, indeed, I still read feeds (As well as Twitter!). Don’t you?
• Photos: Definitely, this was one of the sections I was really looking forward to, but never thought I would have a chance of implementing it. But, again, thanks to the lovely piece of work from Laura Whitehead, under Photos you would now be able to get a glimpse of all of the photos that I get to share in my Flickr account, without you having to go anywhere else. Over there you will be able to find pictures from all of my travelling (Getting started with 2009’s in just a few days from now, by the way!) as well as from the place where I have lived for the last five years: Gran Canaria.

  You may have noticed how I haven’t been sharing as many photos as I once used to and all along there has been a reason for it: not having a good enough photo editing / processing software on the Mac. But now that Picasa for the Mac is there (Which, along with Camtasia, was the only piece of software I really missed from Windows. Now, not anymore!), be certain that I will start sharing plenty more of the pictures I have taken during the course of 2008 and beyond! 😀

• Lifestream: Finally, another section which I was really looking forward to implementing in elsua.net, was the one called Lifestream, which happens to be a super nifty WordPress plugin, put together by David Cramer, and which is going to prove incredibly useful as I start to diversify my online presence in more and more social spaces. Yes, that’s right, I won’t say much about it for now, but things are going to change slightly with my own blogging style and how I get to use other social software tools and Lifestream is the one that is going to put them all together in a single place. Thus stay tuned for more to come…

And that would be it, folks! Some of the most striking, and new, changes that you would be able to notice on my main personal / business blog on the Internet. The rest you would notice how it is much cleaner, a lot less clutter, plenty less widgets (I have only kept there MyBlogLog, since I still make use of it to a certain degree) as I was fully aware how much noise they added to the template as well as slowing down the overall Web site itself. So I decided to take them all down!

Finally, you would also see how for each of the blog posts I will be putting together you will have an opportunity to weigh in your thoughts not just with comments, but also with ratings (Thanks to the GD Star Rating WordPress plugin put together by Milan Petrovic), as well as share across that specific article in various social bookmarking and social networking sites, thanks to another really nice WordPress plugin called Sociable, put together by Joost de Valk.

Like I said, quite a thrill having gone through such a massive upgrade of the blog template, which in reality has also managed to introduce a few new things which I am hoping you would get to enjoy them quite a bit more, but, most importantly, a much more significant change, which is going to be detailed in Part III of this series and which will relate to describe some more the new blogging style I will be adopting (Adapting to) from here onwards. But that would be another day…

(For now, if you are reading this article directly from elsua.net, hope you will be enjoying this new ride, and remember if you find something is broken or whatever other issue or bug, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We will be more than happy to amend things right away!)

Tags: Metablogging, Blogging, elsua, Corporate Blogging, Corporate Blog, WordPress, WordPress.org, Changes, Design Changes, Template Changes, Twitter, Feedback, Laura Whitehead, Web Design, Archives, Links, About, Photos, Flickr, Lifestream, BlogLines, Gran Canaria, Travelling, Picasa, Mac, Google, Photography, Camtasia, Lifestream, Plugins, WordPress Plugins, David Cramer, MyBlogLog, GD Star Rating, Milan Petrovic, Sociable, Joost de Walk, Blogging Style