Well, perhaps you all should come inside and see for yourself .. from the safety of the interwebz!
Made this one today as I had a bit of time to play with, and a desire to find some new images to work with. This was fresh from the Southern Charms preview pages, and it gave me enough to form the first paragraph or so. I liked that the photo had plenty of space to work with to place my text. I even ended up cutting some off to the right side from the original picture.
The safely of being in front of our computer (or device) screen is comforting and possibly arousing, but damn, I wouldn't want ANY part of this, and it's a pretty good reason to stay away from Craigslist, online personals, and possibly even all those "swipe-left" type applications. Or maybe the danger is part of the appeal for you. I won't judge you .. too much. LOL Just don't complain later! Especially when you get exactly what you wanted!
It's a weird thing today. I posted a new caption last night which got about 1200 views so far in about 23 hours. Ended up with one comment. Not a huge shock. Every post usually gets a comment or two, but I did expect more considering this was the first web design update since I started it back in 2010.
Wasn't sure what to think so far, and since it's a free theme/template, I don't have all the control I would like to have. Knowing HTML. I changed a few things I wasn't sure I could with the tools given, and that made me feel somewhat better. I just figured SOMEONE would say, "Damn, the redesign SUCKS!" or "Wow, I can read it better on my cell phone now with some brightness in the background," or "Whatever .. you are so played out it's not even funny anymore."
Nope. Nothing at all. It was the digital equivalent of screaming into a black hole filled with deaf bats. The irony is that, unless all the bots and search engines decided to hound the site at once due to the changeover, I got over 36 thousands page hits in that 24 hour period! Most of them centered on captions off to the side column from what I can tell. The day before, comparison wise, I had 4,997 views for the site. For all I know, the old design was not counting everything properly and I was getting many more views than I imagined, but I will go with the entire TG community wondering if my blog had been taken over by a hacker or something and were curious to what happened.
Soooo, do I keep it like this, try to tweak it a bit more (I don't like that it doesn't show ALL the labels, and displays the last one chosen to overlay onto the photo) or go back to the old way, which I still have saved somewhere. Hell, I could save this one too and switch back and forth to really fuck with everyone. The main thing is this: I really want (and need) some feedback!
You are the bastards that have to view and navigate this shady dark corner of the net. What do you like about the reboot? What don't you like? What did you like (and hate) about the old version? Like most of your wives and girlfriends, the worst thing you can do is not say a damn word when she comes home with a new hairstyle or color. Notice it and speak up! The Tides of March are upon us!
And of course, you can comment about the caption too!
Oh, to give up total control and forcibly feminized - that would be my ultimate fantasy. No guilt, no shame, no regrets, no second thoughts, just obedience (and, hopefully enjoyment).
ReplyDeleteI've been playing with the idea of a blog redesign as well. This was a shock, but not that I've had a few visits to appreciate it, I kinda like it. Only thing that seems off to me is that your banner isn't centered.
I am so glad you liked it then. I was feeling particularly evil when I made it, and got to pass the savings along to you!
DeleteFor some reason, the designer had a left side and a right side, instead of a banner section. The left side shrank every picture down to 320 pixels, so I put the banner in the right side and just wrote something up for the left. I will see if I can figure something else out instead. I am not sure I would want to purchase this theme/template unless I know I could modify everything. I have a few others I could play with that I haven't seen merged unto this blog yet.
The other thing is that however they designed this, there HAS to be a mistake in it somehow where it's loading up certain pages multiple times. The newest post has about what an average post should have after almost a day up on the blog .. but a number of the captions in the "most popular post" have 10x the most recent post .. and since I swapped to the new look, I am averaging almost 38k page hits a day, verse the usual 5k a day.
What that means is I might spend a few hours with another template, fix it up the way I like it, sort of like how I did with this .. and see if I still get the same number of page hits. That would determine if my original page was flawed in data or if is this one.
Love the caption. I expect a safe word is out of the question.
ReplyDeleteI guess its because we are so used to the Dark side that it feels a little of.
It's like the supermarket, you go to the same aslie for the months supply of essential breakfast cereals and find its now full of ladies sanitary products!
They just suck up all the milk!
Well, we'll see if this theme sticks around. I might not be done futzing about with it.
DeleteI don't mind the redesign except that in Chrome, the display cuts off the body text on the right, by a letter or even half a letter on full-length lines.
ReplyDeleteThat is pretty weird. I'll have to view it on Chrome to see if it does it to me as well, though I have a 40 inch monitor. I don't use the entire space for the web browser, but about 12 inches high by 18 inches wide.
DeleteI'll check it out and hit the designer's page to see if there is a correction for it.