Something New

Hey, this site looks different.

When I started this blog 10 years ago, one of the things I loved to do was change the design every few months. It was a seasonal thing, almost. The last version of the site has been pretty much the same — with the odd little edits here and there — since September 2009 (and I know this because that was what I called the “theme”). I’d been wanting to change it for what seems like forever, and I did try a few times, but it was always a struggle trying to find a WordPress theme that I liked, and that I would be able to modify to my liking — and as the web advances, so does my level of frustration grow as I try to modify the increasingly complex code.

Over the past year, the biggest thing I wanted for the site was for it to be responsive — meaning, adaptable to a variety of screen sizes, from mobiles to desktop (go ahead, try it). After a few dead ends, I finally ended up choosing the free Skeleton WordPress theme, by Simple Themes. I’ve changed a few things here and there, and I’ll be modifying it some more over the coming weeks — I just have no patience for these things, and would rather pull the trigger early and then iterate after.

Another thing I want to do is have a proper profile of me up on the site, a written-out FAQ if you will. That’s what the “Who is Jean Snow?” page will be about, and I’ll be working on that in the near future.

But you know what’s also really exciting about this new version of the site? BIG PHOTOS! I’ve been stuck to using a width of 400px for all images on the site since its inception in 2002, and now that all images are automatically resized, I’m breaking free and will be posting images that are as big at 640px across.

The very first image I’ve used to illustrate this is the traditional group shot we take at all of our PechaKucha Nights here in Tokyo — this one is for last month’s Vol. 92 (and yes, I’m in there).