I have to tinker a little bit with the css stylesheets to get it displaying how I like, so ignore little things like the fact that the favicon is now different, or that the gravatars show up twice in comments. I’ll get to those soon.

Let me know what you think, as this is by no means permanent. In fact, here’s a poll. Should I keep this new theme or stick with the old one?

First and foremost, all those purty pictures that used to adorn the header of my blog, the ones that would change whenever I got bored of them, are now on a randomiser. So every time you reload, you’ll see a different image.

Secondly, I’ve integrated gravatars - globally recognised avatars - pretty much everywhere. So unless you want your comments to be illustrated with an anonymous-looking silhouette, you should go and get yourself a free gravatar.

Thirdly, as soon as you start writing a comment, you’ll notice a live preview underneath the comment box. It’ll even show your gravatar off to the side, if you have one. The live preview will interpret any licit html tags you want to include and will output exactly what will appear after you hit ‘submit’, so now you won’t have to email me and ask me to fix up your erroneous formatting tags.

Lastly, I’ve gone and got myself a Creative Commons license, and if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the image and link to the license in the footer. This is just to give me a bit of legal basis next time my posts get ‘content-scraped’ without attribution, and realistically, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

I just hope you enjoy using it as much as I’ve enjoyed customising it.

I thought it would take days and days to do everything, but with a little luck, and a lot of help from the friend who is kindly hosting the site, we managed to get the whole thing up and running in something like 45 minutes!

However, there are a few teething problems that I’ll have to work through when I get some time, such as all the times I linked back to my own posts. All those URLs will need to be changed. Also, the wordpress software supports the same theme as I’m currently using, thankfully, except it’s slightly different and I’ll have to get used to the details, but chances are I’ll be able to load all those perty little pictures that change every so often (whenever I get bored of them), so they can come up at random each time you reload. First though, I have to figure out how to edit that part of the theme’s stylesheet. Until that happens, I’m afraid we’re stuck with the uninspiring defaut image.

I’ve successfully migrated all posts and comments from here to there, and for the next month or so I’ll post everything to both locations, so there’ll be a bit of continuity. Unfortunately though, I’ll lose my blog statistics and my technorati ranking. The latter aint so bad; a while back I’d attained a ranking of 50, but I think they figured out how inflated that figure was and kneecapped me back to 23. I’ve been hovering around 30 ever since. The loss of the blog stats though, is quite annoying, since as any wordpress user knows, it’s rather addictive to see all those statisticss pile up, now I’ll have to start afresh.

As for all the other bits and pieces, such as links and rss feeds, well, I’ll have to leave it up to all of you to update your rss reading software look to the new rss feed, if you use my feedburner feed then you can leave the change to me. Finally, if you link here from your site, could I be a pain and ask you to update your blogroll?