Reading Roars!

As you can see, I’ve made a few changes to this blog.

Gone is the old Oracle (shopping complex, not technology giant) header graphic: I have now introduced a brighter, more colourful banner showing Reading’s ornate facades. Similarly, I’ve left behind a tight, cramped template in favour of one that is broader and more spacious, hopefully making the blog easier to read and use.

Other changes include:

• A widget-friendly sidebar. A widget wha’? Of course, I don’t mean the plastic things you sometimes get inside beer cans, but cool interactive elements that can be added to a website. These might be, for example, a Flickr plug-in for showing images, or a tag cloud (something I intend to deploy soon), depicting the site’s categories in a different way.
• A horizonal nav bar, placed at the top of the blog.
• A two column theme. I’ve dropped the third column (or first, depending on your perspective), as Google AdSense simply wasn’t delivering (I was hoping for a little more than USD 5 in 12 months). It made no sense to keep AdSense.
• A different style. Links are red (contradicting, I guess, a basic law of usability). I may change this, but then red is the colour I’d most associate Reading with (for it’s name, it’s streets and it’s Victorian buildings).

It’s a start and there will be more changes to come. Please let me know if there is something that you feel I should include/exclude/change.