When I switched over to the old templates, I managed to hose Spam Karma a bit – something that was entirely my fault, so if you tried to comment and were rejected, you may wish to retry now that I’ve fixed the templates.

I’m also working on what will be the tenth revision of this site – the look will be quite similar to this one, but with a better background, a little bit more room, and some other visual improvements. Since I’m buried in snow, I figure I can finally get all the many non-work-related web design projects that I’ve been avoiding finally completed. There’s something about being a full-time web designer that makes one less desirous of going home and sitting in front of a computer even more…

My apologies for the commenting snafu, and look for the upgraded templates to arrive hopefully by the end of this weekend.

You’ll notice the whole Single Malt Pundit branding has gone the way of the dodo.

As a good Burkean conservative, I’m a big believer in the value of tradition. And that’s why this site is returning to its roots after a long interregnum. The Single Malt Pundit idea was supposed to be something new and different, but it never quite became what I would have liked. So, thanks to the amazing flexibility of WordPress, it was a matter of a minute to rebrand the site and restore it to its former look.

Those who have links to www.singlemaltpundit.com needn’t change them if they don’t wish to – either domain will work.

I’m still planning on making some tweaks (when aren’t I?!), but I’ve decided that sometimes the older traditions are the best course of action, and it’s time to take this site back to its roots.

I’m off to gorge myself on decapitated land fowl, then spend the weekend in Bacchanalian excess that would make one of Caligula’s parties look like a Catholic girls bording house – so a happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, and I’ll be back with more on Monday.

Jay Reding.com is now Single Malt Pundit.com. (Which should be obvious by now). The old address at http://www.jayreding.com/ still works, as well as http://www.singlemaltpundit.com/. Which address you chose is entirely up to you – all the permlinks and feeds will work with either address as well.

As I mentioned before, I’ve decided to do a little rebranding to freshen things up. Jay Reding.com has been around in one form or another for four years, and while the old site worked, I wanted to go with something different – and this is the result of that process.

The content won’t be changing – I still intend to cover roughly the same mix of international and national politics, with the occasional snarky aside.

Rebooting The Design

You’ll notice the new site breaks some of the old conventions of blogging design. This is quite deliberate. I want to get away from the old 4 piece blog design trend (header, content, sidebar, footer) and get into something new. This new layout features some dramatic new branding, and a new take on the formulaic conventions of the blog. (Yes, I know how pretentious that sounds…).

(The inspiration for this new design comes from this analysis of blog design trends.)

First, we have the new “cover girl”. She comes courtesy of iStockPhoto and the very talented photographer Rebecca Ellis. I figure a little eye candy is a good thing, and the combination of attractive women drinking good alcohol is 99.9% effective in attracting the interest of male readers. The new logo is inspired by the design of whisky bottle labels — and by now if you’re not detecting a theme you’re probably not paying attention…

Below the featured article is a more traditional blog design, with excerpts of recent entries as well as the sidebar.

And it’s the sidebar that has the coolest new feature of this blog. The live search feature uses that great new designer buzzword AJAX . Without going into a long and dorky explanation of what AJAX is, it’s basically a way of taking a piece of content and shoving into a webpage without making the user reload the page. If you’ve used GMail or Google Maps, then you’ve seen AJAX in action. It’s a very promising technology. I’m hoping to expand the live search feature to do some more interesting things as time goes on.

The archive links are also hidden by default – just click on the header to drop down the list of archives. This helps save space without being as annoying as the old form-based drop downs.

Colophon

Amazingly enough, this page does validate as XHTML 1.0 Traditional for those people who are obsessive about code validation. Obviously, the site uses JavaScript DOM scripting rather heavily with the search function. As always, the structure of the site is designed with CSS rather than using tables. Using tables for web design is so 1996.

The WordPress templates are heavily hacked up, but use no custom PHP – everything done here that isn’t done in JavaScript uses WordPress’ built-in functions.

The site was produced largely through hand-coding from an original Photoshop mockup, and was made entirely on my trusty little iBook.

Looking Ahead

Obviously, this is a pretty substantial change to the site. Should I suddenly decide that this was a really bad idea, the old sites no more than a few settings away. However, sometimes a change is good, and I’ve been itching to do something different for some time now – and this seems as good a time as any.

So, grab a glass, pour yourself a drink, and enjoy…

In the next few days, there are going to be some pretty substantial changes to this site, including a total rebranding. Jay Reding.com has been around in one form or another for four years, since I first got bit by the blogging bug in the summer of 2001. I’ve gone from Blogger to Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve gone through roughly 10 different designs, four webhosts, and managed not to lose a single post in the process. It’s been a wild four years.

And now it’s time for a change.

Starting soon, Jay Reding.com will become Single Malt Pundit. The old address will still work, and so will all the permalinks to past entries. It won’t be necessary to update blogrolls or anything of the like, unless you’ve a burning desire to do so.

What is changing is the design of the site. Truth be told, the format of the blog has been getting a little stale. Blogs are all starting to look alike, and structurally, the biggest difference between most blogs is if they have two sidebars or one. While that format works, after four years, I’m up for trying something new. The new site will be arranged more like an online magazine – a featured article at the top, with the rest of the blog contained below.

Plus, being an “online magazine” is the new black (especially since the FEC has it out for bloggers now).

The new design is nearly finalized, and the transition to the new site is scheduled to go off shortly. It’s been a great four years, and hopefully the next few years will be as good…

I’m doing some working on the anti-spam system, which may result in some wackyness with comments for a little bit. If you’re having trouble posting, try again later, it could be that I’ve broken something.

I apologize for all you IE-using suckers viewers, but it appears as though IE was barfing on the site since the latest upgrade to WordPress 1.5. You see, reading instructions is against my religion, so I didn’t bother to run the upgrade script (apparently there was some big change between the latest nightlies and the final 1.5 version), so the pages were getting sent out without the appropriate headers.

After running the upgrade script, everything seems to work. At some point I’ll have to find a workaround for that annoying Safari bug – anyone who knows what might be going on should feel free to leave a comment here or send me an email with suggestions.

OK, so the site is horribly broken in IE and won’t scroll to the bottom. That is annoying. So now it’s broken in a different way, but at least the pages shouldn’t cut off halfway to the bottom. And yes, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: IE sucks.

Why something as simple as a two-column layout that displays well in nearly every other browser (although apparently Safari has some issues as well) will get puked on by IE is beyond me. Oh wait, it isn’t beyond me, it’s because Microsoft doesn’t give a damn….

UPDATE: Well, now everything should work. Some of my margins were just off enough that IE and Safari were both getting confused. Plus, I needed to add a second UL to the blogroll so that IE wouldn’t totally munge up the margins. Now that all of that is done, everything seems to be displaying relatively well in IE, although there are a few minor glitches here and there. I’ll do some testing on my Mac later in the day to see if that also fixed the Safari glitches as well.

Oh well, thanks to the miracle of CSS, at least I only had to edit one file… had it been more I might be tearing out what little hair I’ve left…

UPDATE: Yup, looks like Safari displays the page structure just fine. The flourish on the date headers is still a bit off, but otherwise everything looks good..

Well, despite the head cold from Hell, I’ve gotten the rest of the scripting for the redesign done. So, here it is in all of it’s new old splendor. It takes many of its design cues from previous incarnations of the site, and has that well-worn look that fits with the whole conservative theme.

It’s still a work in progress, and I do intend to tweak things here and there, so if you see anything amiss let me know.

Have a good New Years!