About time! :\ Whats scary is that I have been reading your terminally incoherent thoughts for at least two years, probably more ;)

But I have been learning every time I am here, and its nice.

I also noticed you changed the amount of blog posts on the front page from 3 or 4 to 2.

Btw, I found it very hard to create an image that changes for each category http://digitalpatriots.org (click on the different news posts to see the different header images). If you need my code to get it going, mine is a little — hacky — but you can make it work for you.

@ Luke Maciak:
Make sure you do, you missed a lot by not getting around to watch it. :)

In unrelated news, I installed mod_pagespeed. Google tells me my page should load twice as fast. I can’t really tell if it actually worked. It seems a tiny bit faster, but I might be just imagining things because I want it to work.

:)

@ Kim Johnsson:

Ah, that… I think it was by design. Let me see if maybe I can stretch it out.

James Heaver wrote:

With the Archive section on the right is it possible to display the most recent months as they are but collapse previous years?

Not with the widget, no… I would have to write my own widget or hard code it. But I moved it down below categories and tags.

I will look into the tab order and the chrome thing… The style tags are from a plugin so they really have nothing to do with the theme per se but there might be a way to hack it.

I will also increase the size of the picture a bit and mess around with the colors.

@ Liudvikas:

Oh shit… I think Serial Experiments Lain is still somewhere in my “Unwatched Torrents” folder… Unless I deleted it to make space for something else. Never got around to watching it.

I will check out the other two. Thanks!

@ Matt`:

What reader do you use?

@ Matt`:
You could always try writing a script or yahoo pipe to pull the comic itself.

My reader comes with a setting somewhere to choose between displaying only the contents of the feed, or loading the whole page. I found it endlessly annoying when this meant that half of the comics I read didn’t show the actual comic (just had a link to it) so I changed that setting.

@ Luke Maciak:
Anime recommendations, ok these 3 are all in my top 5 of all time, in no particular order:
Haibane Renmei
Serial Experiments Lain
Eve no Jikan (This one is kinda relevant to your blog, it involves androids :) )

Wow, I didn’t realise I’d been reading your blog so long (I remember the 2008 change, and I’d been reading it for quite a while by then).

I agree with @ Kim Johnsson that the black bar around the header should atleast be as wide as the white content section.

With the Archive section on the right is it possible to display the most recent months as they are but collapse previous years?
If not I would have the archive at the bottom of the sidebar since it is so long.

Tabbing through the reply from I have to tab through each of the style buttons before I get to the comment box when I really want to go straight from ‘Website’ to ‘Comment’.

If you resize the comment text box in Chrome it ends up behind the right hand sidebar.

I also think the background feels slightly too washed out. I don’t know how the image was created, but if you have the full fat image as a layer, and then apply either a filter to it or overlay it with a transparent white layer it might be worth adding some noise to teh layer mask, this will give it some subtle changes in the level of transparency and might make it feel a bit more alive.
On a 1600*1200 screen it repeats a few dozen pixels from the bottom, a slightly longer image, or maybe mirroring rather than repeating it might look better.

Clearly Im getting more and mroe picky as I go along. Overall I like it.
(Although the link to the old theme didn’t work for me)

@ Luke Maciak:
Oh I meant the entire thing, including the black bars. There’s like 15px of white on both sides, which looks weird to me. In my opinion, it’s the kind of header that – if not stretched to the edges – should at the very least have borders on the sides aswell. But maybe that’s just me.

Not bad, Still simple and nice. I really like these new comment boxes :)

However, there is bit too many ads in my opinion. At home I use adblock so I dont have that problem. Do you even get money from those ads?

@ dawn:

I don’t think I ever had a blue theme… Actually, no. That’s a lie. Back on Blogger I had an alternate blue CSS but that was in like 2005. :)

@ Tormod Haugen:

Well… Ads are in the same places they used to be. I like to think they pay for the hosting but…

Oh, here is a funny story. Last few months I haven’t been getting check from Google and I figured out my add revenue just sucked recently. I was way to lazy to log into my account and check. The other day I went through a pile of unopened junk mail on my desk and I found 3 envelopes with checks in them.

I really, really suck at life sometimes. :P

@ Liudvikas:

Well, the old header hand a keybord on it so I tried to look for orange-ish keyboard images and found that one. I will probably change it soon.

As for anime: I never really stopped. I just haven’t seen any good anime lately. I guess it just worked out this way somehow. I’m not avoiding the topic or anything. Just nothing good came up.

Any recommendations?

@ Matt`:

Your feed reader shows the sidebar/theme? Most of them just grab the content from the RSS feed and apply their own formating to fit snugly in the content pane. Interesting…

@ Mart:

I modified the TwentyTen theme which was simple yet functional enough for my needs. Also, this is actually the first time ever I’m actually using sidebar widgets. Old theme had hard-coded sidebar and I never got around to wigetizing it.

@ Kim Johnsson:

Hmm… The black borders were there in Twenty Ten theme and I just left them because they sort of provided some contrast to all the orange. I’m pretty sure the image fills the entire div – I actually checked with an on-screen ruler and the edges align. I think I do see what you are talking about. I think the lighting in the image blends with the background creating an illusion of a gap.

I’m gonna look for a better image. :)

@ Jenn:

Yes, it was the final push. Thank you. :)