Category Archives ⇒ Site News

New Site Design

· Brandon Hann

The new site design was officially launched unceremoniously yesterday at 4:03pm. I decided not to make any announcements simply because the design elements didn’t add or remove any user functionality and therefore appeared normally to all visitors before and after the changed with the exception of the visual changes.

What changed?

Everything! The overall layout has changed and among a large amount of small changes, notable ones include:

  • Google AdSense – Ads removed from right sidebar and placed above the page to the right of the logo. This allows the ads to appear on every post and page, which was not previously done before as the sidebars changed contents as needed by each post/page layout.
  • Social network icons – The icons in the upper right corner of the site were made larger and clearer as to what function they serve.
  • Homepage Featured posts – The 5-post featured slider on the homepage was removed and has currently NOT been replaced by anything similar. A new featured slider will appear above the list of recent posts soon, but will not feature posts from the Featured category. Instead, they will focus on posts of heightened popularity.
  • Ledfrog logo – For the first time in 11 years, the Ledfrog.com logo has dropped the .com. This was done to reduce the length of the logo so as not to run into the new advertisement space. It was also decided that the .com should only appear when the logo is not already on Ledfrog.com (as in advertising and marketing usage).

All in all, I feel that this design change not only streamlines the look and feel I’m trying to express, but it makes things a bit more organized. Ultimately, some of the new features will enable me to enhance the user experience even further in the future.

June 2011 News

· Brandon Hann
I’m currently investigating some major changes to Ledfrog.com. In an effort to further streamline the content I deliver and maximize efficiency for my users, there are times when changes need to be made. This is a listing for proposed changes to take place on or before July 1st, 2011.

Facebook Comments

I’ve been noticing lately, that a lot of blogs are using Facebook for their post comments. This allows anyone with a Facebook account to leave comments on any applicable blog post. The advantage here is that if you’re logged into Facebook during the time you visit Ledfrog.com, you will automatically have access to leave comments on my posts without having to login to my site or use WordPress in any way. This also makes it much easier to have your comment instantly appear rather than waiting for moderation.

My only concern at this point is how SPAM is managed. If I can integrate Facebook comments with Akismet, then I will most likely have this feature integrated by the end of June.

Link Re-organization

As you may have noticed, I use a lot of forwarding links to 3rd party websites. For example, rather than linking to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ledfrog/, I can simply link to http://ledfrog.com/flickr. This practice was started a long time ago as an easy way for me to tell people how to find certain content without having to write down long URLs. Of course, this was long before URL shorten services were so prevalent.

However, as time passed, I ended up with a lot more of these links than I prefer and some of them have even been duplicated! I even had an old standard where I used the word “jump” before every URL just to separate these links from standard links. At this time, I plan to consolidate these links, delete unused ones, recreate more simplified versions and basically just keep things organized.

Theme Changes

There are no proposed plans to change the entire theme at this time, but the color scheme might be changing. I’m playing around with this idea to better suit the original theme colors of blue, white and black. There will not be an official notification if or when this happens. The changes will go into effect immediately and without warning.