It's finally here. My apologies if DMD looked bizarre around 5pm, but transferring my new template across was trickier than I thought. I was really panicking for a bit there! But, after a lot of hard-work and feedback from some trusted "friends of the blog", DMD has been restyled, revamped, and let loose on the blogosphere. I think I'm supposed to smash a bottle of champagne across my monitor at this juncture…
While most of the changes are cosmetic and obvious, I thought it might be a good idea to outline the main differences for you:
Space & Style. I've ditched DMD's narrow-blue look for a wide-white aesthetic. The blog now has also grown to 3 columns, to save space in the sidebar. The extra room is particularly good news for the main column, where posts appear shorter and crisper. The gap between lines is also less cramped, making everything easier to read.
Bookmarks. The footer of every post now includes a handy "Add-It" drop-down menu; enabling you to add that post to Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Myspace, Furl, StumbleUpon, Yahoo MyWeb, Live, Google, or your browser's favourites -- at lightining speed!
Comments. Your comments are now being handled by third-party software called "Disqus", making the whole business of commenting faster, slicker, sexier and easier. You can now re-edit your posts after posting them, and comments are threaded for easier navigation and discussion.
Comments Widget. In the sidebar, the Disqus software has also enabled a fun widget that displays "the most recent comments", "the most popular comments", and "top commenters". Oooh.
Banner & Tabs. The top banner has increased in size, which gives me more flexibility with my choice of weekly banner images. Just below the banner, there's also a Top Tabs nav-bar with direct links to my "TV Reviews", "TV News", "Movie Reviews" and "Movie News" posts.
Search. Next to the Tabs bar is a brand new search box. Type your query and hit return to scour DMD for posts containing your search criteria. At the moment, search results don't display a list of post titles -- but I'm looking at getting that changed, don't fret.
Recent Posts. A list of the 5 newest posts are now included in the sidebar. This is intended to encourage newcomers to visit other pages, if they arrive through an outside link to a specific page. But, it's relatively handy if you don't feel like scrolling down the main page some days!
Video. The sidebar is now wide enough to accommodate embedded videos from YouTube, Daily Motion, Meta Café, etc. I will be using that space to share TV promos, movie trailers, fan-made videos and funny stuff as a regular feature.
At this early stage, some of the old DMD features aren't available, for various reasons:
Star-ratings. This feature was added a few months ago, but hasn't proven very popular. That's a shame, because I loved the interactive nature of these stars in post footers. But, for whatever reason, most of you didn't. Therefore, I don't think the stars will be coming back -- well, not in the foreseeable future.
Adverts. Like many blogs, DMD linked to websites like Amazon with adverts that generated revenue. I never expected to make a fortune (and indeed I can make more cash by looking down the back of my sofa), so I've decided to abandon these ads -- for the time being. Anyway, my new template has a problem displaying Javascript sometimes, so they won't be back until those issues are solved at the very least.
Movie Reviews. Annoyingly, my direct links to movie reviews weren't transferable to DMD2, so I will have to manually retype them! It won't take too long, so bare with me.
Having already received constructive feedback from regular readers, I'm not going to radically change the template now. This is what DMD is going to look like, give or take a few tweaks. However, if there's anything you really, really don't like (and seems easy to change), or you have a problem using the new blog, please let me know!
Finally, I'd like to especially thank Dom, Matt, Sanaan and Simon for their help and feedback on DMD2.0, before opening this post up to any comments (good or bad)...
