As Folks Can See . . .

. . . the changes that I mentioned a week or so ago have now been implemented.

I had TypePad add a bunch of new features and do some redesigning, while still keeping much of the look and feel of the original design.

I still have some additional tweaking to do, which I should have accomplished in the next couple of days.

Hope folks like and take advantage of the new features.

Lemme know what you think!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

14 thoughts on “As Folks Can See . . .”

  5. Well, I’m not thrilled with doing a three-column layout (thus minimizing the space dedicated to your text and our comments) and then putting all the useful stuff on the right-hand side. But otherwise it looks nice.

  6. maybe your header should also be green like the sidebars? Let me know if you need me to design you something in photoshop. maybe you need rotating images in or under the header? It looks like you could also use your left header for your branding as well… kind of like blog 😉 I still need the friend me icon on MY site so you are ahead of me!!

  7. ANDY: Thanks!
    FOXFIER: Cool!
    MATT: The left-hand column will be used. Have already been populating it a bit already.
    LORI: Thanks! I’ll let you know!

  8. Ouch. I always liked this site before because it was so blessedly free of all this clutter. I hate the Facebook and Twitter buttons everywhere. The navigation banner on top is simply a waste of space; that stuff was more effective in the left column. The book image now taking that space gives me horrible visions of ja.o becoming one of those blogs with self-advertisements in the left column going down to ten times the length of every post. Those tag clouds with varying–sized words are pointless, and harder to use than a simple list. (What are Philosophy Photo Captions? Oh wait, that’s three categories – oh no, it’s only two! But what’s a philosophy photo? Dang it…)
    What’s with the links no longer changing color when you mouse over them? That’s decreased functionality.
    And those thumbnail images! Aaarrgh!

  9. PACHY: Thank you for your feedback. I’ll be addressing some of your concerns as we go along. (And there won’t be tons of self-advertisements in the LH column; max 2 at any one time; probably only 1.)
    In case it helps, one of the reasons for the shift was to get the site away from the advanced templates that it was using previously. The advanced templates caused me no end of headaches. Every time TypePad would change a feature on the basic templates it would break something on my blog and SDG and I would have to scramble to get it fixed.
    That’s one reason that the comments would display incorrectly when they got over 100 per combox (we think).
    Now that we’ve used the basic templates to emulate the look of the advanced templates, we shouldn’t have problems like that.
    Also, I now no longer have to write custom code that is outside of my comfort zone, so I have been put back in charge of how things appear on the blog and will be able to make sensible changes as we go along instead of being unable to address matters. (I’ve already made a bunch of changes in the last hour to tweak things that TypePad did and make them more to my liking.)
    As to the FB/Twitter integration… that’s the world we’re living in now. FB has *half a billion users,* *one fourteenth of planetary population.* I would stunt my ministry if I didn’t take steps to make it easy for those folks to interact with the blog. FB integration = more apostolic good.
    I want you to know that I value your feedback, I appreciate your honesty, and I will look into addressing concerns you’ve expressed. I hope this helps make clearer what I’m trying to accomplish.

  10. Hey Jimmy,
    Thanks for asking for feedback.
    I had to LOL when I read “becoming one of those blogs with self-advertisements in the left column going down to ten times the length of every post.” That’s my impression of Ignatius Insight, but I still love reading that stuff.
    The “Categories” stuff at the right side is useless to me. I liked the subject list you had at the left side of your old format.
    I like the new format okay, probably because it’s so close to your old format, which I’ve gotten used to.
    Hope this helps!

  11. FB has *half a billion users,* *one fourteenth of planetary population.* I would stunt my ministry if I didn’t take steps to make it easy for those folks to interact with the blog.
    Water has 6.7 billion users – 100% of the planet. We should be throwing notes in bottles. 🙂
    The Helpful Chicken

  12. And we should be throwing the bottles in water (dang, I screwed up the joke).
    The Embarrassed Chicken

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