New Design: I hope you like it
2 minutes read | 416 wordsIt was about time. Something like 3 years ago I redesigned mostlymaths.net, just after purchasing the domain. Cleaned the design… But left lots of cruft on the side.
Back when I started writing HTML for myself, one of the best reading experiences I saw was Paul Graham’s one-column text. Also, the reasoning makes sense. When I needed to redesign mostlymaths I tried to go one-column, but I fell for the sidebar trap. Added a section with most-viewed posts, an Amazon widget, a post archive… Lots. Of. Crap.
I had been thinking about cleaning up everything for quite a few months and then Matt Gemmell posted a very interesting post: Designing Blogs for Readers. I have been following his twitter account and posting for a while, and many ideas in this post rang a bell.
For the past few weeks I have been putting off several writing ideas saying to myself: I’ll write it when I do the new design. So screw it, the other day I devoted like 45 minutes to clean up everything. I borrowed a pair of numbers from Matt’s CSS (font-size and font-height, mine are slightly larger but are close to his) and basically deleted every design thing that wasn’t useful.
I have killed comments. This was hard, because I love interacting with readers, and quite a few of my best tweeps have started with me commenting on their blogs or them commenting in mine. But as of late, I have been neglecting answering and moderating, and the best solution was to remove them. If you want to comment, feel free to click on contact on top. I’m not very fast answering my “personal” email either, but eventually I do. You can also reach me over twitter or the Facebook page for mostlymaths without many problems.
I left a lone ad on the side (I may turn it into 300x250, but for now I like how small it looks) and I will probably add social sharing at the bottom and find a good way to inline code (no, I don’t like github styled widgets). Currently you can’t even share what you read here. This is not exactly done on purpose, but after all, if you want to share something you can do it without needing a button. I know I do.
Oh, and if you are subscribed by email you may have received a stupid-looking email with many images. Sorry! Messed up with a draft post where I store images I have used.