In an effort to streamline my life and (hopefully) make this site a little more constructive, I’ve been making some changes around here.

The first would most likely be the theme. I’ve had a few friends mention that some of the pages backgrounds are headache producing so I switched to one that is more subdued. This one will most likely be temporary, however. While, as a writer, I am a big fan of fluid width themes, the author of this one (Arclite) is in the middle of creating another (fixed width) theme that I found to be absolutely hilarious. He said it was close to being done, so maybe within the next few days…

The other big thing that you may have noticed is the “WP Greetbox” which sometimes pops up at the top of the first page/post you visit, dpending on how you came to the site. It’ll ask you to consider subscribing to the RSS feed and may also suggest you make use of the “Share This” link at the bottom of each post. The former is part of the streamlining I’m doing. As much as I want to I can’t keep up with every web community that I belong to. No, this does not mean I will be leaving speed_fic but you guys have to promise to write more Racercest. I’m going through major withdrawal, here. 🙂

It does mean that I will be cutting back on where I’ll be posting links to my posts. So, yeah. Subscribing to the feed is good. The default for FF users is to bookmark the feed, but if you have the CoLT add-on you should be able to snag it by right clicking the link  and pop it into another client (I’ve been using Thunderbird’s reader). Otherwise you’ll have to go through the bookmark’s properties. IE users (boo! hiss!) will have to deal with Feedburner. I have no idea about Opera, Safari and Google Chrome users.

I’ve also added a popular posts section, as well as a widget that offers suggestions for further reads. And for the LJ fanatics, I’ve added the ability to subscribe to each  post’s’ comments. Like LiveJournal you’ll be able to read (via email) all new comments to a post. Unlike LJ it’s optional and you can change the settings at a later time.  Those, along with “Share This,” should help draw in more visitors and strike up some conversation.

Until I see the final version of the other theme I’m interested in I’m not going to mess with the fonts. If you are having trouble reading (and it’s likely as I am), you can enlarge the text via your browser and resize your browser window so the lines are a readable length for you. This is why I love fluid width themes: they can be tweaked by the end user for their own optimal use.

So. If anyone is having any issues with the changes I’ve made, please let me know. That way I can fix them ASAP.