New Blog Commenting Policy

Due to the large number of spam comments, it is necessary to make a change to the blog commenting policy.

New Blog Layout

It’s the end of the Holidays. The Iceburgg theme by DevLounge had to go, since there was no more snow . There isn’t any snow here, and I’m looking forward to Spring, so I just changed the theme.

In addition to the theme change, I have also merged together the Blog Policy and the About page. The sidebar is now much less cluttered. These enhancements should make blog posts a priority and reduce loading time.

Look for changes, because I’m VERY picky on themes.

–Deathgleaner

A New Month, a New Theme

Well, it doesn’t exactly work that way, but I decided it was time for a change. So look at the comparisons of the two themes, before and after:

Before (iNove)

After (Silver is the New Black)

I was beginning to get annoyed with the deep colors of iNove so I finally decided to switch. The new theme (which I will call “silver-black”) is much more clean and I think it takes less time to load. The big focus is on the width of the blog posts, not the widgets. I also like how silver-black is flexible-width, unlike many other themes here. The only drawback is that it doesn’t have top-level page navigation, but I can get around that.

Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators

Wikipedia administrators have turned Wikipedia into an online totalitarian regime, and no one is doing a darn thing about it.

Review: HootSuite 2.0

Just a few days after Twitter launched its new homepage, HootSuite also revamped their interface. They offered an “early upgrade to HootSuite 2.0″ for everyone.

I tried out the new interface, and I must say it’s not bad. For those people who have used the old HootSuite before, the interface isn’t too difficult to navigate. For people who haven’t used this Twitter client, though, the interface may look quite complicated, but is also very intuitive.

One of the major changes in the HootSuite 2.0 interface is the addition of multiple columns. By default there’s the home feed column, mentions, direct messages inbox, and pending tweets in a three-column-at-a-time view. In the old HootSuite, these columns used to be separate tabs. I believe the change from tabs to columns was a smart choice since some people like me want to view multiple things at once.

The multi-user support is also a key feature in HootSuite. In HootSuite 2.0, different Twitter accounts appear as separate tabs. This is also very helpful, since it is easy to navigate to different accounts, but if you manage a lot of accounts, it gets cumbersome. The tabs can also be reordered by drag-and-drop, another time-saving feature.

Other features in HootSuite include:

• User profile viewing
• Favorite, direct-message, reply, and re-tweet
• Auto-refresh
• Embeddable columns (which don’t work for me)
• And much more!

I would give HootSuite an 8.5/10 and would seriously recommend it to anyone who has multiple Twitter accounts or who just loves tweeting.

Twitter’s Got a New Look

New Twitter Homepage

Very recently, Twitter changed it’s home page to a newer, more sleek and modern design. The old homepage was quite bulky and outdated. One reason for the redesign was to explain to Twitter newcomers what Twitter really is. If you’ve ever tried to do this, it’s hard. People usually tell others that “Twitter is a service to stay connected with your friends and tell them what you’re doing”, but most people respond with: “who cares what I’m doing?” Now Twitter has changed its tagline to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world,” since Twitter has now become an avenue for news, advertising, and public announcements.

Placing a list of trending topics by the hour, day, and week also helped to exemplify this concept. The trending topics could be clicked and search results consisting of the most recent tweets would pop up. Another prominent new feature in the new homepage was Search, which can also be found in http://twitter.com/search (and it took me a long time to discover that it was even there!) Furthermore, Twitter.com/search now redirects to Twitter.com, so the two have merged.

The homepage didn’t have the screenshot of Twitter/Home anymore either. In my opinion, that was a good change, because I didn’t want to squint to read the text, and though I did, I knew it wouldn’t make sense to a newcomer. I still wish they had the “watch a video” link so people could discover more.

Overall, the new homepage design was a wise change. Hopefully now, Twitter will have more traffic and people joining the conversation