The concept of the gravatar - the ‘globally recognized avatar’ - made sense a few years ago. With the advent of social blogging communities like MyBlogLogs, gravatars seem to be less in use (certainly less by our readers). So I’m switching from gravatars to MyAvatars, a Wordpress plugin that adds MyBlogLog avatars to comments.
I’ve been bored with our old design for quite some time and finally got the time over the last week to refresh it. It took a few tries before Trish ok’d a design - she’s suprisingly averse to change in some ways. I felt that our our changed outlook on life - defining our dream and actively working towards it - needed to be reflected in our blog design. My goal was to make the blog brighter and more open, with colors that reflected a beautiful sunny day. The colors were inspired by the grass image that’s been in our header for ages, and by the bright blue sky that stretched forever in Costa Rica.
This is my first WordPress theme from scratch - the previous theme we used was hacked from another theme. All the WordPress code used to throw me for a loop, but it’s been well over a year and the php stuff makes a lot more sense now. This design is still a work-in-progress, and I need to add some little touches to make lists easier to read, etc. I also have to iron out some weirdness with Internet Explorer 6 and other browser anomalies. If you happen to see something that doesn’t look right, I’d love it if you could bring it to my attention. When the design is totally complete, I’m going to release a less-personalized version for free for others to use on their WordPress blogs.
I’d also love it if I could get a ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on the design 
It’s been a quiet few days for us, but I’ve been busy figuring out how Wordpress’ theming (design) works. We’re happy that the site design reflects us more, though I will say that the theme we had been using was quite a nice and well-conceived design. Our theme is still a work in progress - I *think* everything works properly, but it’s quite possible that I haven’t clicked into every possible area. The main things that still need work are the sidebar and footer areas. In any case, I hope y’all like it. I’m considering making a generic version available for download.
We’ve been using WordPress 2.0 for a little over a week now, and I feel comfortable enough to give an assessment of our experience thus far. First off, we both enjoy using it because writing a post is easy. With our previous system (Joomla), it involved logging in, clicking a button for content items, clicking a button to make a new entry, being limited to one category and clicking between a couple of other pages to do stuff like upload pictures, edit tags (to circumvent the single category action), and so forth. And the interface wasn’t very conducive to writing.
In comparison, WordPress is a breeze to use, so easy that I think we’re much more inclined to write. We can select and add categories easily and file/image upload is a piece of cake. All the options for writing are one page and we can keep the ones we don’t use that often closed until we need them. Wordpress seems like it was made specifically with the user experience in mind - it just works. No wonder it’s been downloaded 1.4 million times! Let’s look at some of the specific aspects of WordPress 2.0.
