New look for the New Year

Happy New Year! The traditional Chinese new year aka the Spring Festival is coming. And I decided to change the look of this blog, finally, after two years.

The new theme is based upon ericulous’ GenkiTheme. I really love the built-in color scheme which is the last thing I would do it from the scratch. And the three-column layout is such a different experience for me as well.

The following plugins are used for the navigation and SEO:

• Customizable Post Listings
• Sitemap Tags
• WP 2.3 Related Posts
• Top Posts By Category

Since WordPress 2.3 supports tag out of the box, the Simple Tag plugin is not longer needed, WP 2.3 Related Posts uses the tag for relation between posts, that is much more lightweight than the full-text search alternative.

Top Posts By Category is used for the Popular Post since Popular Contest does not work very well with WP-Cache. Customizable Post Listings is just for Random Post.

There are also some minor modification tailed for my personal preference as well:

• The color of the blog title is OK in Firefox on Linux, but too flashy either in MSIE or Firefox on Windows.
• The HTML tag for post title is h2. h1 may make more sense for the bot.
• The same applies to the blog title in the sidebar

There are still more things to go:

• Embrace OpenID/Live ID and other 3rd party authentication to encourage comments
• Add avatar support