I feel a lot better now. It took more effort than I expected to do the redesign, but now it is done. Comments are welcome, as well as suggestions. Would a calendar be useful, etc? I did not expect that I would have to learn some PHP and CSS, but it proved useful to do so. Almost makes me want to tell stories about programming exploits in my early career, but I think I would bore most of you silly.
Over the next few weeks, I will be adding some subdued advertising, and setting up an Amazon Store, with (initially) short reviews of investment books from which I have benefited. If you want to buy the books, I appreciate it, but my service here will be to give you enough knowledge of what the book is about, that you can figure out whether it would really be of value to you or not.
On a different note, much of next week will be devoted to finishing my slides/talk that I will be giving to the Investment Section of the Society of Actuaries at the Annual Meeting on October 15th. I’ll post the slides here when I’m done, and you all can have a look at them. My talk is on the Global Macroeconomy. Small topic, huh? I offered others, but that was the one that they most wanted, and would be the most challenging for me. Good thing that the markets have gotten so interesting — when they asked me to speak back in April, things were much quieter.
Again, I thank you for reading my blog, and particularly for those who register and comment. You make the blog and my life richer.
Umm, I don’t see a big difference. The title page at the top is different, and the font on the text is different, but it has lost a lot of the smooth stylization from before. It is much more plain text like.
I don’t think this is the source of it, but I am running Safari as my browser.
Maybe it would help if you described what you changed, that way we can say whether we are seeing the changes or not.
Hi David,
I find your blog very informative and useful.
Here is a minor suggestion for your new section on the purposes of your blog. It might be better to say that you are aiming to tie all markets into a “coherent whole” rather than a “consistent whole”.
David,
I like it. Clean, simple and straight to the point!
Dale Simmons
I love the new design. Thanks for all the work you put into your blog; it’s the first thing I check every morning after my email.
“Almost makes me want to tell stories about programming exploits in my early career, but I think I would bore most of you silly.”
Please do. Please.
“Over the next few weeks, I will be adding some subdued advertising, and setting up an Amazon Store, with (initially) short reviews of investment books from which I have benefited.”
I am really looking forward to this. Thanks for adding this feature.
Thanks again for the fantastic blog.
This looks great! well done. this is a daily must read for me
Fairly trival, but since you asked, I would antialias the text and symbol in the top graphic.
At the moment it looks a liitle too jagged.
Ugh, so I’m the grouch.
Well, obviously content is king, so I’ll be coming here regardless. But I stand-by my position it looked better before. Actually, I go so far as to say I rather liked the old look. It was sub-dued and unique (at least amongst the blogs I frequent). It was also very clean. So many blogs have the side-bars filled with so much junk it is annoying. This one felt different because it didn’t have all the visual clutter.
With the redesign, I feel that’s been lost. The top graphic is jarring: too much contrast. Overall the look is too stark. For instance, there is no background color to visually differentiate the various sections. I’m not really a graphic design guy. I have an eye for what works and what doesn’t, but not really the training to describe it to others.
David, I’ll say I can appreciate the amount of time you spent on the site’s re-designed look. I am a software engineer and know how tedious things like this can be. But I’ll say there’s a reason themes are commodities available for purchase. They take a lot of work and given limited resources, one has to concentrate on the areas where one’s skills are most effective. I forget what the economists call that. Specialization or something.
In any case, as I said I appreciate the content and will be coming back regardless.
One other quick thing. It is common for clicking on the title graphic to take one to the home page. This is particularly handy when finished reading the comments section of a post. Obviously the back button works as well, but sometime clicking the title graphic is more convenient.
OK, another quick thing, it is nice when the top of a entry has links to the next and previous one. For instance, if there are 3 entries since the last time one visited, one can navigate directly from entry to another without going back to the home page. I reckon that is also possible with the “recent entries” column, but more-than-oneway-to-do-it is nice.