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…]
by Andy Merrett
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.
by Matt Craven
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.
by Matt Craven
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.
