I’ve even seen it used for full corporate sites and photoblogs elegantly.

But it almost does too much, is too powerful, requires too much attention.

I’ve had my eye on Tumblr for a really long time, but I could never pull the trigger on it. Frankly, I’ve got over 5 years and 900+ posts that I want to keep. But the concept of the community that Tumblr presents, combined with the fact that a lot of really funny and interesting people are on there has got me interested enough to give it a try.

I’m currently trying to figure out how to feed my Tumblr into my Feedburner account so those of you reading through Google Reader (or whatever other RSS reader flavor you might be using) don’t really notice, but as of yet, I haven’t figured that out (any help on this would be superb).

For now though, if you’re my friend on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll see my Tumblr posts come through. Or, you can just go follow me on Tumblr:

ShaneLife.Tumblr.com

I’m not abandoning Wordpress just yet. But it’s on notice.

Well, that change is now.

It would be freaking super if I understood the rhyme or reason behind it or how to fix it, but I don’t. All I know is that my feed is jacked up right now and I’m trying to fix it. I hope this doesn’t cause too many problems. I may end up abandoning Feedburner altogether and just returning to the standard Wordpress feed.

We will see. I’m just giving you a heads up.

What gives?

UPDATE: I figured it out. Apparently, I had a small line of code that I forgot to insert when I changed my blog theme.

The subtlety of 24 ways use of alpha channels combined with the release of Wordpress 2.7 (which proudly powers this site) inspired me to take a more comprehensive crack at a new blog design. Feed readers, I know you probably don’t care much about what I’ve done here, but it took me much longer than I had imagined. Converting those hex colors I wanted to use for my scheme into the more complex RGB colors was arduous, but if you visit my site now with a newer browser (Firefox 3 or Safari are preferred, although Google Chrome should work), you should get the full translucent experience.

I’ve also taken Derek Powazek’s advice to embrace my bottom by pushing some of that sidebar stuff to the bottom of the page. I’ve lost all the links from the sidebar…I plan on adding a page of just links to the blogs that I read, but for now, I hope you’ll manage without my referral links.

You’ll also notice at right the many other places you might find me online. I use Twitter more than any of them. Some of the others I’ve signed up for more with the intention of seeing what they were about than anything else.

Anyway, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the new design. Especially if they confirm my awesomeness.

Now, on to the next project…

Feed readers aren’t going to see a bit of difference. Since I run my RSS feed through Feedburner, it was an easy switch.

I’m almost certain to lose some of my readership and it’s possible that I’ll lose some of my advertising, but honestly, I don’t really care. I like the domain too much not to use it and there’s no going back now.

If you link to this blog, I’d be super duper appreciative if you’d update your links.

A redesign is forthcoming, but that might take a while.

I still haven’t made a decision as to what I’m going to do about shanelife.com, but stay tuned. I will.

Now, I’m going to do my best to leave the house as little as possible over the next few days. I was wondering the other day…is the hermit the arch-nemesis of the hobo?

Last weekend, I upgraded my WordPress installation to the newly-released 2.5, which represented a complete overhaul of the administrative interface, designed by the fine folks at Happy Cog. There have been a ton of reviews. I’m not going to recount all of them, I’ll just share my experience.

The actual upgrade was easy (as usual).

WordPress is notorious for their 5-minute install or upgrade. I thought there might be a more extensive upgrade process than in the past since 2.5 actually changed some of the MySQL database tables, but it was extremely easy.

The admin interface is clean (but everything is really big).

I’m not sure about how Happy Cog chose to align the grid. I love the new comment bubbles, but getting used to a whole new admin interface is a little weird. I wish there were some tutorials on customizing the interface (there are, but I’m too lazy to look extensively for them), but one thing I’ve always disliked is the Dashboard. I like that I can customize it now with the feeds that I want to see.

I like the fullscreen writing feature, but the default fonts are a little big for my tastes. I’m tempted to go into the CSS for the admin, but I’m scared of it. I don’t want to mess with Stan’s code. I do like that the default font is now Lucida Grande…that I like. Much better typography.

My custom theme held up pretty well.

I’m very happy that my custom theme didn’t break, although one of the plugins I’ve used since the beginning doesn’t work in the sidebar anymore. (If you’re wondering, it was the plugin that showed the recently added comments.) It’s not surprising that it broke the plugin because it was originally written back at the tail end of 2006. For now, that little feature has gone away. I’m not nearly smart enough to write that plugin. Would love for someone to fix it though.

So far, it’s kind of slow.

There seems to be a bit of a lag with publishing posts and loading admin pages. Are any readers out there having speed issues? Maybe it’s just on the admin side…

Anyway, that’s my review. I really like the look of the interface, but it will take some getting used to. I realize that much of what I’m referring to has nothing to do with the readers, but for those that run WordPress, you’ll know what I’m talking about if you decide to upgrade. I know that The D has been experimenting with it and I haven’t seen any profanity-laced WordPress posts from him, so that’s always good.

I imagine that upgrading could potentially break my theme, so I’ll wait until I have some time to troubleshoot, but it will be fun to play around with. What may end up happening is if I have enough fun with it, I’ll end up rocking another re-design of this blog. But work will have to calm down, both 8-5 and 7-11.

You’ll just have to wait and see…

I found a fantastic plugin that sends notification e-mails using SMTP instead of PHPMail.

Sweet.

Don’t forget about my pledge to not eat red meat. Help me buy a cow from Heifer International.

I’ve been wanting to create my own Wordpress theme for a long time, but I’ve always been terrified of breaking the three years of blogging backlog I’ve got, so I never tackled it. Then Travis recently took a crack at it and he said it was easy. Now, granted, he is a genius. However, I was intrigued and I’ve been wanting to customize my site ever since. I am, after all, a web designer by trade.

So I mocked up what I liked in Photoshop and coded the XHTML. Then, I used an existing theme to try and figure out the nuances of Wordpress and PHP. I managed to figure most of it out and for the last 6 or 8 hours have been working diligently to get it up and running.

There’s no doubt that it’s buggy and I’ve missed plenty of stuff, but for now…it works.

As for the pink – you’ll notice that the design is rather dark…the only color coming from splashes of pink. I’ve decided that to raise awareness for Breast Cancer Awareness month. In addition, the darkness of the site is actually BETTER for the environment because monitors do not have to work as hard to display black. So in “going pink”, I’m also “going green”.

I’m planning on putting in a CSS switcher that will allow you to customize your colors to an extent, but that’s down the road. For now, I must say I’m pretty proud of myself for not breaking it. Sure there will be growing pains, but the fact that I managed to create a widget-ready theme in a night…well, that just makes my header all the more true.