Tweaks...and more tweaks!

I've spent a good amount of my time in the last couple of days surfing the internet for "hacks" and "tricks" on customizing my 'Yard'. And the difference is for all to see.

To sum up, the major changes are:

[1] The post section is much wider now, giving more horizontal space for the post text to flow and thus shortening the length of the page. So it means you won't need to scroll down a lot to read my posts! :-)

[2] On the home page of the blog, only synopsis of posts is available. For those who wish to read full posts, a "Read More" link has been provided to continue. This reduces the lenght of the page by a HUGE amount (in my case, as much as by 60%!), thus allowing me to accomodate more post synopsis (rather than displaying the full post itself) on my home page. And more importantly, it gives my readers less navigation headache as they can browse through 12 of my post synopsis on one page.

[3] The post dates and the sidebar titles have been highlighted. This is significant because combined with [2] above, it was necessary for me to 'separate' the posts by some logical divisor. And I chose to separate by the date/time the post was posted. What this does is that it allows visitors to quickly differentiate between different blocks of posts, and also sidebars. Because in the earlier version where there was no such highlighting, it was hard to say where a sidebar ended and the other one began.

[4] When displaying posts by label or by date of publishing, a summary by post titles is shown. This is in stark contrast to the earlier, default setting where if you clicked on a particular label to show posts relevant to it, then what you would've got is a display of all the posts - and their full body. This would again mean that a reader would have to scroll through all the posts. This has been taken care of with the new display where the summary is displayed as post titles where readers can quickly find what they were looking for. Coupled with [3] above, it also makes it easier for readers to differentiate by the date blocks.

[5] YouTube like 5-star rating tool has been added to my posts, thus allowing readers another easy option of providing feedback. Provided by outbrain, the widget is easy and well understood by all thanks to the popularity of YouTube. So the next time you don't know what to write, all you need to do is pick a star and let me know! Simple!

[6] Relevant posts are now displayed (by labels) within each of my posts, providing the reader with more similar content in the blog.

[7] Email author, Submit to Facebook, etc, options are present under every post. I'm hoping that this will provide more interaction with my users who opt to email me instead of commenting directly on the post. Or if you find one of my posts worth sharing with your friends, then you can submit it to your FB, Digg it, Stumble it, found it DEL.ICIO.US - take your pick!

[8] The posted comments have been highlighted - with separate color code for the author (yours truly) comments and reader comments. Go on - commenting is no more in black and white!

Coming from a lazy ass like me, that's quite a lot of tweaks in 2 days. More so because not all the hacks fit right 'into' the template XML. I had to use whatever was left of my programming skills to figure out some of them.

Some of the better sites/blogs I referred to were:
http://www.blogbulk.com/
http://www.blogspottutorial.com/
http://anshuldudeja.blogspot.com/

Of course, you can find a lot more sites and blogs (even the blogger help is very good) but as a blogger who follows the "Blogger Code of Ethics", it is only fair on my part to give credit to the sites mentioned above.

Also, expect some more changes in the future, but since so many significant changes were made this time around, I thought it'd be worthwhile dedicating an entire post to it.

Go ahead, take a look around. And yes, don't forget to let me know what you think. I'd welcome any suggestions/feedback of any kind.