Blog for a living

Hi there everyone! I’m sorry I haven’t posted for almost 2 weeks, but a nice mixture of 2 days of laziness, some time needed to think about what I’m going to do with this blog and the new design was responsible for the delay, not me, I’m absolutely innocent I promise

As you can see, the blog has a new design, which I don’t think is going to last forever, but I’m sure it’ll be used much longer than the previous one.
As I’ve mentioned in this post, no free wordpress theme can compete with the one you make for yourself. And it’s not because yours will be so awesome, but because it’s unique, and the feeling that you made it for yourself gives you the very special feeling that you really “own” the website.

I hope you guys like it too, I’m quite satisfied with it at the moment, although I still need to make some changes here and there, and maybe the colors came off a little strong, but I think it’s really not bad for first try.

Why?

The reason I created a new theme for the blog is that I wasn’t completely satisfied with the previous one, it bugged me every day, so I thought the best solution is to make the change early, so I can focus on writing after the design is OK.

I learned to love GIMP

All the images and graphics on the site are made or edited by GIMP. It’s a free photo- and image manipulation software, much like Photoshop except it doesn’t cost you 999$. I always wanted to learn how to use it for easy tasks, but over the past few days I’ve found that it’s much more powerful than I thought.
You can do literally anything you can do with Photoshop, you just need to learn how to use it. So I’m sure I’m going to use it intensively in the future as well with photo manipulation and stuff. It made for much bigger challenges than the calculator on the right for example

I learned to hate Internet Explorer

If you’ve ever designed a web template from scratch, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Sure, I’m a total beginner in this area, but it wasn’t the only reason why I had so much trouble with IE. After you get everything in place and are very happy that it looks fine in both Firefox and Chrome, then you check it out in IE, and you wonder why it loads some kind of Picasso gallery rather than your blog. It’s just a big mess. Then you make some changes to clean up your code to be good enough for Internet Explorer (although I can’t understand if it’s good for all other browsers, why isn’t it good for IE..), but then I find that most of the errors are not even my fault, in fact they’re well-known IE display bugs that’s been existing throughout 3-4 versions. It seems ridiculous there are so many online discussions dedicated to help you solve IE bugs. Why haven’t they solved them yet if they know about it since IE 5? I can’t understand.
But after hours of work and some compromising I could solve all the problems, fortunately. Though in IE the site is still not the same… Uhh, probably this is the main reason I won’t redesign the blog for a long-long time.

New stuff

As you can see I’ve made a lot of changes including some ad placement optimization, with the banner at the top, I’m also curious how adsense backgrounds will perform, and the little calculator of course, so now you can bookmark my blog easier

But the biggest change maybe is that I “converted” the blog into a full site, with a home page, and some other pages as well, like the Blog For a Living Center, where you’ll find my biggest series, some contests I’d like to hold and other crazy stuff I make up.

I also changed my mind a little bit about how I want to and how I should write, I won’t go into details, you’ll see it anyway in the coming posts, but you should expect longer in-depth posts in the future.

I’m also going to promote my blog in other ways to make it more fun and less boring for me, you’ll see what I’m talking about in the Honest Blogging series.

Hmm, I think that’s it. Now you know what to expect, so stay tuned and don’t miss the next posts.

I welcome any suggestions on how to make the design or the blog better, and I’m very curious what you think about it. And be honest, I won’t be aggrieved