Quite some changes happened at the website in the last few hours and I want to write some lines about it.

new theme

As you can see I installed a new theme. I have fallen in love with it from the first moment I saw it. It is simple and elegant, perfect for a personal site. It may be a bit disorienting that the first post you see on the home page isn’t the most recent post in general but the most recent post in the featured articles category, but I prefer it that way.

This change wasn’t easy though. I had to make the theme xLanguage (multilingual) compatible, to fix an issue with international characters, to add some rss icons (borrowed from Atahualpa) and make some adjustments in the css file. So, although I know nothing of php, css and xhtml, I managed somehow to tamper with code in all these languages and make the theme work better than the original. Also I had to find new plug-ins, translate and adjust them too to my needs. Last I had to create two new logos (one English and one Greek), a favicon, seriously reorganize my categories and add thumbnails to my posts.

The good thing is that I love the result and that is what matters.

original appearance of www.andmarios.com www.andmarios.com after the first facelift

new 404 page

This was a sudden inspiration. I tried to make a photograph that had some “contrast” and when I saw the result 404 came to my mind. Check it here: http://www.andmarios.com/error

new server

Same hosting company, new server. The old one had some lag so they transfered me to a new one. I haven’t decided upon it’s speed yet. In the noon it was really fast, like a local install. In the night… oh my god , it was like the site was served from the ENIAC (first computer ever made) through a 14.4kbps modem on an analog line distant call! It seems though that the problem isn’t from the web host but from OTE, my internet provider as I just tried to connect through my university (by vpn) and the site appears very fast. OTE is by far the most expensive internet provider in Greece so they better fix it soon.

zero ads

Two weeks ago I introduced some ads. I hate ads but I thought that if they can compensate for the web site’s costs it would be nice. This site costs about 110€ a year (hosting, domain name, theme). Thankfully the ads didn’t got me even one cent in two weeks so I removed them without hesitation. I am not going to sell my self for a few cents, I am way more expensive google! :p

That’s all folks! If you find a bug or a usability issue on the new site just let me know!

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1025&message=34046251&changemode=1