As you will have noticed if you’ve visited my site in the last couple of days, I’ve adopted a new WordPress theme and fiddled around with the content as well. The primary reason for this are the performance issues that my previous theme was causing — I should’ve really looked into it a lot sooner. Anyway, things are hopefully running smoother now, although I’ve got several things to sort out still.

The theme in use now is called Sentence, by Kriesi. It’s a premium theme, i.e. I paid for it. The main advantages of this are that the theme is thoroughly documented and supported, gets frequent updates, and is in general better optimized (for instance, it’s responsive to mobile devices by scaling down the resolution, do try it out on your phone or tabloid!). Having said that, this guy Kriesi is obviously not a native English speaker, and I’ve had to hunt down some typos in the PHP files, as well as fix obvious bugs… The widgets require a some more work too, and there are a couple of performance bottle necks that I might try to sort out eventually. Anyway, any feedback on the functionality and performance of the website and blog are much appreciated.

Couple of things worth noting. Firstly, the FeedBurner RSS feed for the blog is still active, it’s here. It looks like I scared some subscribers away by briefly making the feed ‘summary only’ when browsing through the various options with the new theme. Not to worry: I plan to keep the full content visible in the feed, and it should work as before now. I also discovered a handy little thing that shows the number of current subscribes to the public, check it out:

While I’m advertising FeedBurner feeds, recall that I also have one for my Garmin Connect activities (with detailed descriptions of my runs, including maps). There’s also one for my PhilPapers RSS feed, where you can mainly stay up to date about my publications.

Secondly, a nice feature of this new theme are portfolios. I’ve wanted to find a way to feature my photography ever since I integrated my blog and my website, and the portfolios seem to be a good way of doing it. There are already some of my favourite shots up on the Photography page (and also a link to my full gallery, which I’m hosting on this same server). I will keep the content of the portfolio down to a small number of my best and favourite photos though, instead of clogging it up — check back later for new additions while I’m going through my catalogue. Note also the possibility of ‘liking’ individual shots in the gallery: basically you can click through to the full image from the portfolio link for a nice feature page with the photo and a description, and you can add comments, ‘like’, or tweet about any individual photo.

Well, that’s the bulk of it, but like I said, there will be some further improvements coming, and the site is very much still looking for its final appearance (among other things, I plan on tweaking my CV and research pages), and there are some silly features in this theme that I need to fix (especially concerning featured images of a blog post). Any feedback on this is welcome, so take your time, browse around, and leave a comment or drop me a message.