Once a year or so I get the bug to redesign my site. I’m never 100% happy with how it looks, and one day I’ll find myself tinkering with something tiny, like the placement of a button, and end up completely changing the whole thing. That happened this week. I wanted to share some of the changes/updates/fixes around here, and also let you know that things might be a bit wonky while I work out the kinks and finish the redesign.

New features and updates:

• Responsive design: The site will automatically recognize if it is being viewed on a tablet or mobile device and resize/strip content appropriately.
• Social connections: Connect with me on facebook, twitter, or other places online.
• Easier share links (via facebook, twitter, etc)
• Partnership links to the work I’ve done with Everytrail, Evernote, and Columbia.
• Notification box at the top (you can click the little x in the corner to make it go away).
• Disqus commenting system: Old comments are currently not visible but they are not gone. Unfortunately the import is taking a while on the Disqus side. They should be merged soon.
• Experimentation with affiliate ads: I don’t blog for the money, that’s for sure. This site is never going to pay my mortgage, but ads do pay to keep it running and buy me the occasional beer. I’ve had Google ads running here for a long time, but I’m going to switch to a model where I pick and choose what is advertised. So that Backcountry.com and REI ad over there ——> were specifically chosen by me because that’s the kind of stuff that would be interesting to ME as an outdoor consumer. And hopefully more relevant to you. When good sales and stuff come along I’ll point ‘em out. And if you click though and buy something I get a tiny amount of that $. When I talk about gear here I usually link to somewhere you can get it online anyways, so I might as well get a little something back for sending business their way!

Still on the to-do list:

• Content cleanup: I have a lot of out of date content on my pages that need updating. I’ll get to that when the design is good enough.
• (done) Photo page design: This blog is a self-hosted WordPress, but I store my photos on Smugmug. Tweaking the Smugmug UI to match my blog design is not an easy task, which is why it is still stuck on the old look. I’ll head over there and start working on that design next.
• Posting schedule: I’m going to be more disciplined about posting here. There will probably be more regular, but shorter posts. We’ll see how that goes…
• Speed: I’ve noticed that this new template loads a bit slower. I’ll work on some of the scripts to make  sure that the content loads faster.
• Testing on older browsers: This template uses some technology that isn’t available in older browsers. I checked my traffic sources and a very small percent of you are using these older versions of IE and things might not look perfect. But if you’re on one of those older browsers my site should be the least of your worries since half the internet probably doesn’t work.
• Review old content: Some older posts might not look quite right. I need to go back and click though some older content to make sure it’s showing up correctly.

I’m coming up on my 8th anniversary on this blog so there is a bunch of legacy stuff that doesn’t always play nice with newer technologies. Plus I have fun geeking out on the backend and that means I break stuff.  So, bear with me for a while as I work out the issues.