Rudd-O.com.3.0 is now officially on the air

Notice any changes? I've been hard at work, redesigning the site.

Fruits of hard labor, long planning and reasoning have brought this change to you.

This site is now using a fully original WordPress theme I like to call Magazine. The name? Oh, yeah, the whole site revolves around sections, and you're encouraged to browse the site in that way. It's more a magazine than a blog.

Why the change?

The idea behind the monumental change is to encourage stickiness (people reading a large amount of articles). If you find an article on a topic you dig, chances are, you'll want to read more on that topic. The site is geared to enable that. You can also subscribe to feeds per-category, so you don't need to read junk you're not interested into.

Details, details, details... that's where the devil is

Quick lowdown on the changes (because I have to run):

• Obviously, the visual layout is completely different. It responds gracefully to the new concept (magazine-like layouts)
• Excerpts are everywhere on the archive pages. With a glance, you can identify what you want to read the most.
• Navigational aids are everywhere. Everything is much more heavily hyperlinked than before.
• The palette and the design! You no longer need to watch me while reading this site ;-).
• Everywhere is the concept of "popular articles", so you can get a quick look at what's hot on this site, and ask for more with a single click.
• Less clutter. Less popular elements were removed entirely from the design, and only the essentials are left.
• Sociability! All posts are social-bookmarking enabled, Digg-enabled. They're also e-mailable after a single click and a destination e-mail address.
• Readability: the typefaces are bigger, and more elegant (you may not enjoy it fully if you don't have the Gill Sans font installed). All fonts are scalable (except for header fonts).

IE6 is dead. Long live... uhh, Firefox?

This theme was designed entirely using Firefox, and screened for consistency on Konqueror.

Since it uses advanced layout techniques which work only on compliant browsers, some pages may not lay out correctly with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or older. You will be able to read them, but you won't appreciate the entire design.

If you're using IE6, switch to a standards-compliant browser. Because no features incompatible with IE7 were exercisedm hopefully IE7 will render this theme properly.

Final musings

It's a brand-new theme, built from the ground up, and designed to make you crave this site. Is it working already? I sincerely hope you like it.

Love is in the air... Love is in the-e air...