It’s been a long, loooong time in coming, but I think I’m finally ready to unveil the new look of Breathingfire.com. I started this particular design (one of many I’ve started but never finished,) in February for what was going to be the new look of my personal website. After switching things over to here, and getting a nice break from school, I was finally able to finish it up.

I’d like to stress that this is an entirely original design, all coded in CSS and XHTML 1.0 Strict by hand from the ground up. I only say that because I’ve been using someone else’s template for my blog for maybe 2 years now, and I’m quite proud to be back in the game. Some straggling items may cause some invalidations, but I’m trying to fix them all. Also, if you happen to run into anything weird looking, please let me know.

I’d like to take a second to praise the Wordpress team for their fine product. I’m using Wordpress 2.5.1, and it’s magnificent. It makes running a blog and a website so much easier than it could be. It’s written entirely in PHP, so templates are easily laced with the proper functions and conditional statements. Extra functionality is made easier (and more securely, by not having to touch the main Wordpress code) by plugins. Right now I’m running 12 plugins to manage things from comment spam to movie reviews to emails and more. It’s really a thing of beauty. And finally, the support community at the Wordpress forums are invaluable. They’ve gotten me out of quite a few jams.

As you can see, this design pays particular attention to my interests, represented by all the junk at the top. While it’s just 1 or 2 images making up the collage now, maybe someday I’ll get around to making it interchangeable.

The Most Popular Posts list bases popularity on things like the number of views, comments and ping backs a post gets. Right now, my NBA Playoffs bracket is going gangbusters and is getting lots of comments so it’s number 1.

My del.icio.us links are scattered throughout the main posting column, and I’ll be adding to that whenever I come across something interesting. You can spot these by the white, blue, black and grey de.licio.us logo next to the post.

My latest movie review is shown on the side, with a link to the rest of the reviews. On other pages than the home page, you will see links to posts similar to the one you’re on.

I’m trying to find a way to list songs from my Mac itunes playlist, but I’ve been unsuccessful so far. That might get replaced. Also, I’m looking into doing a podcast of some sorts. More on that later.

Anyways, thanks for stopping by to take a look. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. I appreciate it! And make sure to stop on by frequently or add my RSS feed to your reader of choice (I prefer Netvibes, myself.)

Tags: bfdotcom, css, webdesign, wordpress