Word to the Wise

There will be some light blogging here through the end of the year. We are headed out for our first vacation in years next week, then will be spending some time with family. I will be blogging before we leave and will try to get some posts written to trickle out while I’m gone.

I hope everyone has a happy and relaxed holiday season. I am looking forward to resting, recharging and returning ready to take on 2009.

As you can see we have updated the blog theme. This is a custom theme based on the WordPress K2 theme. The overall look is much lighter and fits in better with our main website.

As part of the change I have also re-categorized all the previous posts into 4 categories: 

• Best Practices contains posts about best practices for delivery, both in terms of technology and in terms of policy. This is also where stories of bad practices are included as examples of what not to do.
• Delivery Improvement contains posts discussing how to improve delivery, including examples from my experiences with clients. Announcements about ISP changes are also in this category. 
• Industry is commentary on posts from other delivery and marketing blogs, news articles and happenings in the industry.
• Legal has posts about email related civil cases, comments on laws affecting email delivery and comments on criminal prosecutions of spammers. 

Across the top are navigation links. I expect to add a link to reference pages, including links to ISP websites, in the near future. The About section will also be expanded with more information about Word to the Wise. 

On a wide browser, the blog is set up as a 3 column blog. The far left column is for posts and content. The middle column has a search box, links to posts in the 4 categories and an Asides box. The Asides box contains links and very short posts and I expect to update this frequently. There is a separate RSS feed for Asides posts. 

The far right column has a calendar showing the full month and days with new posts. Clicking on the months under the calendar moves you back and forth through the months. Clicking on the arrows centered under the calendar displays a list of post titles for that month. Under the calendar is a blogroll, and links to recent posts and recent comments. There is an RSS feed available for recent comments. 

The 3 column design neatly collapses to a single column design for narrower windows. The far right column folds under the middle column. For very narrow windows, the middle and right columns are folded to the bottom of the page under the main content. 

In the content column, main posts have icons indicating what category they are included in, a permanent link to the post (which will act as a trackback link), a link to see other posts in the same category and the author. At the bottom of the post is a link to the comments page. As you scroll down the page, navigation to older pages sits at the top of your browser window, making it easy to move backwards or forwards through the blog. 

Clicking on the post title or “more” shows you the whole post and any current comments. There is a navigation bar at the top that lets you navigate across posts (this does not work on some older browsers). 

On the comments page, you can read comments, subscribe to a RSS feed for comments to that post and make new comments on a post. There are comment avatars, randomly generated from Gravatar.com. If you have registered at gravatar, that will be displayed for you instead of the monster avatar. 

Overall, these changes should make the blog easier to read. We are still tweaking things, so if you have any thoughts, comments or bug reports feel free to comment.