Welcome to the new James’ Blog

Welcome back everyone to the new James’ Blog! Under the place holder page that you’ve all been seeing for a month or so, this is what’s been hiding underneath, a new theme and many changes to the back end! Did you enjoy the countdown timer I added on the place holder page? Well I was laughing, one of my friends suggested I should also have Europe – The final countdown playing when you visited the page, but I thought that was going too far. Anyway continue reading to find out all the changes to James’ Blog!

The new look and makeover

I had decided that after two years of using Renovatio (My first WordPress theme I ever coded) that it was time for a change. My new theme named Mutare (latin for “to change”) is the product of months of work. I wanted to make this theme better than Renovatio in every way so I spent a lot of time on it. The theme isn’t the only change to James’ Blog, you’ll find a lot of features and a lot of “under the bonnet” stuff has changed also, read on to find out more.

New Features:

• Comment system – The comment system now uses Dsiqus rather than WordPress’ built in comment system. While there is nothing wrong with WordPress’ comment system I’ve seen Disqus being used on a lot of blogs and websites and I like the whole easy of use with being able to post comments using loads of methods like Twitter, Facebook, OpenID and more. So now all comments are now handled using Disqus, but don’t worry all comments previously on the WordPress system have been imported to Disqus, so any comment previously posted will still appear, just in Disqus.
• New jQuery Slider – With the new theme comes a new jQuery slider that’s built into the theme, unlike Renovatio the slider in Mutare has a caption feature where rather than writing text on the image file itself can simply written on the images HTML title and alt attributes, the new slider also features a smoother transition effect.
• Changes to ad spots – I don’t want to turn my blog into advert infested website, but I’d still like to make a bit of money out of it, but the new advert slot on the sidebar is now one large 200 x 125 spot which rotates. I don’t think I’ll be adding anymore ad slots any time soon. As always however, the advertising system is provided by BuySellAds.
• A new twitter account – Because of all the changes to James’ Blog I decided to have a separate twitter account for the blog. Previously I was using my personal account @James_W, but I’ve decided that my blog should be seperate, so you can now follow my blog’s twitter account over at @jamesblogs all the previous stuff like the RSS feed (Powered by Twitterfeed) and new updates will all be posted on the jamesblogs twitter account for now on. But by all means follow my personal account too!
• Better handling of post thumbnails – The post thumbnails which we all love are now handled better. Ever since WordPress 2.9, the WordPress devs implemented direct support for post thumbnails right into WordPress which meant you no longer had to use a plugin or hack to get them in a template theme. I’ve taken advantage of their lovely work and now use a better post thumbnail system! You should find they load much quicker and are more optimised.
• Optimised Database – It’s no secret that WordPress uses a database to store pretty much everything you see here in it, but with the new theme comes a better handled database, before the old database had got quite cluttered and even with pruning and removal of orphaned database tables it was still quite bad, the new database however, is much cleaner and faster which should give a nice speed increase on page requests.
• Caching system – WordPress is a very dynamic and powerful, with PHP being it’s main code base, while PHP is awesome and all, it can create more load on server’s resources and because WordPress serves it’s content as PHP pages a lot of PHP request fly around. Here’s where the caching part comes in, thanks to the WordPress plugin, Super Cache! Super cache basically generates static html files of the normal PHP pages and seamlessly offers them to the user without them even knowing. So while you browse the cached html version of a post, the server takes break and go has it’s morning bytes bar. You should see a speed improvement on loading content.
• Better Search Results – WordPress is a great CMS (Content management system) but the one thing that hasn’t always been great is how it handles searches. I’ve always integrated a search function into my WordPress themes as it’s very important, but this time I’ve been working on making search results better, and thanks to the plugin Search Unleashed they are! Each search using keywords like “Windows” or “WordPress” will bring up results based on relevance and certain characteristics (like post content/meta data) of the post rather than just in date order, which should improve your search results dramatically.

Well that’s about it for the main changes on the new James’ Blog theme and back end. I hope you enjoy the new theme, if you have any questions or comments about the new theme, why not be one of the first to use the Disqus comment system and post your thoughts, or you can use the contact form over at the contact page!