The Contemporary Nomad is where five authors talk with you, dear reader, about the important subjects of the day. Whatever we decide they might be. Read more 
S T E I N H A U E R
If you scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand margin, you’ll find a new link called “Beta Theme”. Click that, and it’ll take you to a mostly blank screen telling you to follow another link. Click that, and you’ll end up at the new template I’ve been working on. It looks kind of like this:
Same content, different format.
Scroll to the bottom of that template, and you can always return to the original style by following a similar link.
I’m doing this largely because the basic blog template of a post column and a links column bores me to tears, and partly because I can’t help tinkering. I’m not going to force anyone to move to the new template yet–right now it’s just for trying on.
The major change for the reader is the use of drop-down menus rather than lists. To me, it’s a more elegant interface, but you may disagree. Another thing you’ll notice, when you look at search results and individual posts, is the addition of Google Ads. This, too, is a trial thing, to see if I can defray the domain and hosting costs of keeping the Nomad going.
These measures are just to help push the Nomad slowly into certain, and hopefully better, directions.
September 5th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Looks good, more balanced, more professional … probably because it reminds me of a newspaper.
Jeffery Hodges
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September 5th, 2006 at 1:43 pm
Newspaper is about right. That, or magazine. I like that it allows 2 posts to remain on the top, and gets rid of all those messy side-links without actually losing them.
The other benefit is that the theme it’s based on–Hemingway Reloaded–doesn’t have to be tweaked and tweaked to work properly in all browsers, unlike the original one.
One negative is that some people might not like having to click to read the rest of a post. It’s all about trade-offs.
September 6th, 2006 at 3:15 am
Looking good, Olen.
My only suggestion is to make the ‘more’ link expand without loading up a different page. I’m sure there’s some javascript out there that should make it easy.
September 6th, 2006 at 8:21 am
I was thinking about that, Daniel. There’s the issue of front-page formatting–particularly image formatting–in a 2-column set-up. As it is, I have to shrink front-page images to make sure they don’t go past the borders of the column. Also, it would require fetching the entire post, rather than the excerpt–that means the “more” mark would be arbitrarily placed where the individual author decided to put it, if they decided to put it anywhere at all. Which would result in irregular front-page lengths. I think. I’ll look into it some more.
The real problem, of course, is that I’ve got too much time on my hands, and I’m not using it for writing. Today that will change. Or maybe, tomorrow.
September 7th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
Some programmer I am, I should have realised it would never be that simple.