I've redesigned again since this article, though you may find some of the links helpful.

We are in the future of 2014 and since it’s been about a year since I’ve changed this blog’s design, I thought time would be ripe to do it again! It’s taken me quite while longer than I would have like this time, but I have a good excuse for that in the form of the birth of my first son!

I’ve based this design on themes I’ve seen for Octopress, with a large area to place more importance on the content of the blog. I’ve also added a sidebar back in because the site is now 100% width, with a focus on search. I’ve been using a great search plugin called Relevanssi that replaces the default WordPress search, and adds features like indexing, result weighting and search hit highlighting.

For the sidebar icons I used Simple Icons and once again I’ve used the excellent highlightjs for syntax highlighting of code snippets, for example on the JavaScript I used to highlight the currently selected page!

var page = window.location.href;
if (page.indexOf('archive') != -1) {
  var link = document.getElementById('nav_archive');
  link.className = 'selected';
} else if (page.indexOf('about') != -1) {
  var link = document.getElementById('nav_about');
  link.className = 'selected';
} else {
  var link = document.getElementById('nav_articles');
  link.className = 'selected';
}

Let me know what you think! Here is a comparison of old vs. new!

New

new design

Old

old design