The Smidgin

If you didn’t notice, the website has undergone a few changes today.  Yesterday I was inspired to move the Smidgin off of WordPress.com and host it myself.  WordPress gets top marks for how easy it is to migrate a website running on the software.  You can literally export from one website and import into another and, voila, it is ready to go.  (With a bit of tweaking to file storage, virtual hosts, mod_rewrite, and the like, of course.)

One of the nice things about hosting the site myself is that I can make minor changes and updates to the theme and various other pages.  Another one is that I can now more directly include The Smidgin: Development instead of having the site split across two servers.  And, finally, I now have direct control over my Google Analytics, which is an awful fun piece of software to play with.

If you see any bugs, let me know. I tried to make everything transfer as easily as possible, but more than likely I messed up somewhere.

Enjoy the new site!

BBC appears to have sent the redesign of their website public last night.  When I checked the news page this morning, it looked like this:

My initial impressions are favorable.  They’ve retained the main red color, while still making it a bit less forceful.  Everything is basically in the same locations, but I can tell that there is more whitespace in the design.  Remember, in web design “whitespace is your friend”.

Not having spent much time on the rest of  bbc.co.uk, I can’t really comment on it, though it does look like the redesign spans the whole site.  I wish I had a screenshot of any part before the redesign.  (Though if you just want to look at one, there are plenty on Flickr.)

As you may have noticed, I’ve updated the look of the site. It’s somewhat simpler, but I needed a change. Let me know what you think of it.