Innovations in blog design are now pretty few and far between. Blog design has pretty much settled into conventions that work. It’s one of the reasons I can be so happy with settling on just the Thesis WordPress theme and why I love it so much.

Every now and then though someone still manages to come out with a tweak or idea that makes me smile. read more

Movable Type has announced that its Sandbox for Movable Type plugin is now available, allowing the many Sandbox themes to be used on the MT blogging platform.

Beau Smith writes:

Ever thought about radically changing the look of your blog without much design work? Are you a designer who likes to work in semantic HTML and do amazing things with CSS? Maybe you’re moving from WordPress to Movable Type and want to keep your current design. Sandbox for Movable Type may just be what you’re looking for.

To install the plugin in Movable Type 4.2, it requires PHP set up on the server (pretty common) in order to generate dynamic CSS classes. The plugin is available to download now.

Scribd, a popular document sharing service, has launched a redesign. TechCrunch takes a look:

One of the major changes in the design is a new emphasis on search. Scribd has seen impressive growth since its launch in Spring 2007, and now claims more than 20 million unique visitors monthly. But more than half of that traffic comes from search engines - something that the site would like to change. The new design is intended to make the search function more prominent, encouraging users to turn to Scribd instead of Google or Yahoo when they’d like to find a document. And CEO Trip Adler says that it’s working: while A/B bucket testing the new design, Scribd has seen the number of searches double (the number of uploads increased by 70% as well).

Scribd is a great service for incorporating complex documents into blogs via their widget for posts and other functions.

FriendFeed, the highly popular social discussion site used by many (including me!), is previewing a beta version of their new site design over at the FriendFeed blog.

The design will feature several new features, such as Friend Lists:

Friend lists enable you to organize your friends into groups. With friend lists, you can get updates from your family separately from your coworkers, or you can add an acquaintance to a list and remove them from your home feed.

Another new feature is seeing a feed of your friend along with all of their subscriptions:

You can now see a feed of a person and all of their subscriptions. This new feature is a great way to show your uninitiated friends what your FriendFeed experience is like, and it is a great way to find interesting people you haven’t subscribed to yet.

All of the new beta features, layout, and design can be seen at beta.friendfeed.com.

Twitter experienced an unplanned outage, and is down and out for maintenance. They are using this outage to upgrade the affected database, according to a blog post. The service is still down, but hopefully we’ll be getting our microblogging cravings satisfied soon.

Speaking of Twitter, they have apparently tested a new design on select users. SheGeeks and TechCrunch have got screenshots.

I’ve often inspired by looking at the works of others - whether that be a beautiful blog, a well-written post, an unusual piece of architecture, or a graphic design that simply takes my breath away.

Fuel Your Creativity, a design site & blog, is currently featuring 50 Kickass Logos from websites, blogs, and online services that can help fuel your design creativity.

Many blog related designs are featured, including 9rules and Feedburner.

CNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber is offering up a glimpse of the new design at CNet in a post on his CNet blog:

We had two key goals with this CNET revamp–make the site easier to use and speed it up. Simplicity is the major theme of this design, and that includes the new “pipeless” CNET logo, a more consistent site structure and a streamlined color palette.

The back-end infrastructure has also been reengineered. We have a new API that is helping to deliver pages 40 to 50 percent faster, and makes it easier for our partners, such as Yahoo and Univision, to work with our content.

After more than twelve years looking at the same yellow & green webpages, I’m looking forward to seeing something a bit more “modern” over at CNet.

Apparantly, this is the week for blog redesigns - with both Joi Ito and John Battelle of Federated Media either deploying new looks, new blog frameworks, or posting new screenshots of what their blogs could look like.

I know Thord has been working on the redesign of The Blog Herald as well.

Anyone else dropping a new look & feel on their blog this week?

I have no idea who this Brothercake is, but he has submitted a pretty interesting piece titled Stop using Ajax! to the Opera Developer Community. It’s lengthy post, and he finishes it by summing it up like this:

1. I’m not saying Ajax is bad, I’m saying it’s immature
2. 2. I’m not saying never use Ajax, I’m saying don’t use it for the sake of it, and try to avoid it for now, instead sticking to accessible alternatives

Like all new technologies it’s easy to get caught up in them. It’s an interesting post, I advice you to check it out if you’re a web developer, or just plain curious.

Lots of blogs are using ajax, most via plugins to add cool functionality. The admin interfaces are full with these things. Should we stop using ajax?

Blogger Khoi Vinh, who blogs at Subtraction, is also the design director of the New York Times - where he leads a team of 11 visual designers, information architects, and design technologists that work on the user experience of nytimes.com.

He was interviewed this week in the New York Times as a part of their Ask an Editor interview series.
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