RichGilchrest.com Relaunched

Photo by nickyfern

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

It’s only been eight weeks since my last post. Why are some of you people being so impatient? I mean, I actually received two e-mails asking if the blog was dead.

I wish I could say that I had been lounging on that beach in one of those chairs next to that infinity pool. Alas, that is someone else’s picture of my dream. What I have been doing, although not nearly as beautiful and relaxing, may get me there someday. I have been working like crazy to build new BANS sites, which are making money for me. I’ve also been working to build a variety of content-neutral BANS themes, which I intend to sell as a package to other BANS users. The program comes with some very basic themes, but a with little effort you can make your eBay store look just as sharp as any other website out there.

School, of course, kept me really busy as well. I will never again take two six-week classes at once. That’s eight credit hours of material crammed into a six week period. Every single week I had to complete eight to twelve assignments, including two to four papers. Insanity. HUGE mistake.

Now I’m on vacation until January 7! Apparently I didn’t call in sick enough at work this year, and ended up with a depressing amount of of PTO (Paid Time Off, for those of you fortunate enough to not live in the corporate world) left over. I can only carry over 40 hours to the next year… that’s never been a problem before, but it was this year. I actually had 52 hours, six and a half work days, left over. So I get to start the year with a nice break. May as well use up my carry-over as soon as possible, before I forget that I have it.

Let me explain the new theme before it scares anyone away. I realized that one of the reasons I had trouble writing new blog entries was that I wanted everything to be long and serious. I didn’t want to give myself any room for shorter or more personal content. I was boring myself a little, which made me less willing to make time for this.

Taking a cue from the new trend in magazine style themes, I decided to build a new layout which would give me space for once-or-twice-a-week serious, more in-depth content that will be featured more prominently, and additional spaces for shorter, less important content. The new theme uses categories for nothing more than determining which box the article will appear in, making tags an even more important piece of my organization.

The new theme, you may have noticed, is very short. At a high resolution, the article excerpts all fit on one screen. Even at more common resolutions, the entire page takes up no more than two or three screens. Everything important is above the fold. This is an experiment in design… so many blog layouts, including my last two, go for long and narrow. They also contain massive amounts of information in the sidebars. Again, I’m going the other way. Not much there now. I may re-add some widgets in the future but for now I’m going with the plain look.

I’ve also taken a tip from Skelliewag, one of my new favorite blogs, and added some more visual flair to the layout. Th image slivers on the main page page are a questionable design choice, one which someone people already don’t like, but I like it and want to give it a shot.

Anyway, I’m back, and I won’t take another break like that for at least a month. Promise.