I’ve been busy for the last couple of days improving my site, and tonight those changes went live. First of all, I decided that I’m not going to do my usual summer design refresh. At the moment I’m very pleased with Clean and Mean and I still think it has some life left in it. With that said, the majority of the changes focused around keeping the theme slick. Second, a lot of my page content was getting stale, so I improved almost every page. Finally, I fixed some tagging issues. So, let’s look at what exactly I did.

The Sidebar

My sidebar was getting bloated. Basically, everything I wanted to show off was in the sidebar, and that didn’t make for easy browsing. To fix the problem I removed anything that wasn’t relative to the page at hand. However, I didn’t really remove the content; it was just relocated. Archive-related material can now be found in the Archives Page, and my Flickr and del.icio.us information is now in the Social Page.

New Pages, Removed Pages, Fresh Pages

Speaking of those pages, I should introduce them. I now have an Archives Page which will allow you to check out the old content on my site. I also now have a Social Page. The Social Page displays information about the Web 2.0 services I use, and was largely inspired by Paul Stamatiou’s Linkage Page.

To continue my cleaning up trend, I removed a few pages which really weren’t doing much. My links page has been removed, since most of the interesting content I find can now be viewed in my del.icio.us profile. My diet’s page was removed not because I’m no longer on a diet, but because I never kept up with the page. Finally, the random facts page was removed because there wasn’t any good content on that page.

I have one page which was freshened up. My About the Site Page was rewritten to be a simpler read, while getting more relative information across to new visitors. Hopefully, the new page is better than the previous.

Easier Reading

In terms of reading improvements, a few changes were done there. I have added more space between each line of text in hopes that it’s easier on the eyes. I have also fixed a rendering bug that has been prevalent on my site since the beginning. Safari users can now enjoy reading text at the same size as the rest of the browsers. Last but not least, I have reduced the amount of posts which display on each page. That should make scrolling through things easier.

Fixed Consistency

I had a major problem with tagging consistency on all of my Apple posts. Basically, every post was split between the os-x, mac, and apple tag. To remedy the problem, I made a new category for every single Apple post, called Apple. I also revised the way I tagged those posts. The tag os-x is now for anything that is operating system related, mac is for the hardware, and apple is for things which regard the company.

Conclusion

Well, those are all the changes I made. I hope they make browsing the site easier for both my existing crew as well as my new and future visitors. If you happen to notice something out of the ordinary with the changes, drop me an email and I’ll check on it. Other than that, enjoy.