Site redesign and new plugin

A new design! I decided I needed a new and fresh look and the result is the still-in-progress ‘Guangzhou’ theme. My hope is that it’s both easier to navigate, as well as being lighter and more suitable for future work. Comments, as always, are welcomed.

In conjunction with the new theme I’ve made use of WP-Cache and Gravatar cache, which should result in a noticeable speed improvement. The site itself has undergone a good clean, with all invalid code being replaced, all dead-links now corrected, and the addition of new sections for software, articles, and about myself.

On top of that I’ve added a new plugin: HTML Purified. This plugin changes the default comment filter and replaces it with HTML Purifier, a very exhaustive library that checks, validates, and corrects HTML. Not that WordPress is insecure by default, but this just beefs it up a notch, and ensures that comments are both safe and XHTML valid.

9 comments

  1. It will be available to download, although it’s still a work in progress and isn’t available just yet. If there are any specific enhancements you can think of, or things you don’t like about how it currently looks, then list them here and they will probably be included in the release version.

  2. This is a lovely theme!

    One question john: On the home page, how do you display your latest post differently from other posts? Is there a plugin to do that or did you use a custom hack?

  3. Hi Mark, not yet – it’s still a work-in-progress (read: I’ve not got around to finishing it)

    Mohsin, neither – the latest post is part of the theme. I just modify the normal loop to display the first post separately from the rest. It’s not something a plugin can do for you.

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