Hi everyone. I’m testing a bunch of things, and this is an open thread where you can discuss them if you want. Among other things, I’m looking at different themes (=skins/designs). If you’re interested there’s a lot to choose from here. I’m imposing the following constraints
(i) Two-column layout
(ii) Widget ready
(iii) Fast loading (not too much Javascript etc).
The current theme, which is fairly bland, is Aqueous-lite and meets all these criteria. I may be able to do a little bit of fiddling with fonts and similar, but please don’t just say “change the font”, give me some idea what you would like.
On point (iii), I apologise for the technical problems with the site lately, including breaking of the RSS feed for some users. I am looking into all this.
I’m trying to minimise hand-coding stuff and am now working with widgets like the Active Discussions at the top of the sidebar. Suggestions for good widgets gratefully accepted.
John Quiggin 
Testing
Fast loading isn’t working very well at the moment. There were many delays in the registration process, some pages (such as wp-login.php) seemed to take over me 30 seconds.
The theme looks slightly different with Firefox (v1.5.0.11) and internet explorer (which I tested using the IE Tab (version 1.2.0.20061113) extension in Firefox). In firefox the word ‘perspective’ is on a separate line below ‘Commentary on Australian & world events from a social-democratic’, and the bottom half of ‘perspective’ is cut off by the white background. In IE, all of the words are on the same line and the word ‘John Quiggin’ is a bit smaller. Also in Firefox the blue bar is light blue at the top and dark blue at the bottom, while in IE the bar is all dark blue.
On the subject of themes, I have always though of johnquiggin.com as a red website, and my brain finds it disconcerting when it is another colour 🙂 So my vote is for a red theme.
Comments at the top line never seems logical to me. Comments follow the end of the piece. I blame Microsoft.
Still testing, but very slow. Sorry about this.
John,
I have a little script I used to build a log of Club Troppo performance when I was discussing our recent slowness problems with Dreamhost. Send me an email and I’d be happy to discuss what I can do to help.
i frequently get “500” errors when loading johnquiggin.com, and i never used to.
Any chance of getting dates in Australian, rather than US, format?
Things do seem much faster today – I don’t know what you did, but it worked.