Monday was one of those days you dread – this site’s server had a catastrophic failure and I had to restore the VM from an Azure Backup. Luckily, the process worked perfectly and I was back online. But I realised that I just wasn’t doing a very good job at running the VM, the software (MySQL and WordPress), and managing the site.
So after getting things back online, I spent a bit of time doing updates and re-engineering the site. And this is the result. The site has a whole new home page with featured posts, and recent posts in several key categories. The blog has much more imagery, and the design is brighter, more modern, and easier to read. Hopefully you agree.
Good Job! 🙂
I totally agree, it’s much better now!
Digging the white background Aidan. Much easier to read.
Honestly, I don’t like the homepage. I always enjoyed going to your main page and just being able to immediately read the latest article.
The article layout and the featured / categories is nice, but it seems too Petri style theme for a single person blog site. Now if you were to let other people post here, that would be a different story.
Def cleaner although the black was cool. Just have to switch to Blog instead of Homepage, no prob, and the RSS is working fine. Most importantly, your Search is working again 🙂 so much better!
Mind = Blown…!
Aidan,
The old page was better, easier to follow you and your train of thoughts, the old style black was kinda of an Aidan Finn signature and unique to your blog.
But.. Well we will get used to this I guess…
The old style is right there in the blog – just click the button on the menu. The theme has changed, but I haven’t. I’ll be pi$$ing off as many people as usual 🙂
Full agree with Joe :
The old page was better. : “the old style black was kinda of an Aidan Finn signature and unique to your blog.”
LOL, black as the core of my soul 😀
Hi, I love the new style.
i would only suggest to set permalink with article names.
Much better for link sharing ; )
Thanks. I’ve done that just now 🙂
New layout is much easier to read with my old veteran eyes, especially on smaller screens.
I dont like the layout of the website it was much easier to digest the information from one page, much more clicks are required to get information now. I also think white on black is much easier to read.The old theme looked much more professional and cleaner. Any reason you host the website inside of a VM rather than an Azure website?
Running a VM gives me ownership of a VM so I see all the comms, experience all there is, etc. Plus I have full potential performance of MySQL, which ClearDB charges quite a bit for.
Hello,
Sorry, but I don’t like it.
Too much things on the homepage to be readable.
You have then to go on the Blog page.
Again, you have to click on the title to read the blog article…. And click again to go back to the summary page…
That makes me think of a new MS Windows version. Nothing new, just need to do more clicks to do the same as before….
But, as Windows, we’ll get accustomed to, because we have to…
Did you also change dns settings? https://aidanfinn2.wpcomstaging.com gives a 404. I used to type in that url to check your blog, doesn’t work anymore..
Use http://www.aidanfinn.com.
Best practice with Azure is to use CNAMEs, and strictly speaking, CNAMEs don’t support www.