New blog look

I've rolled out a new look and new structure for this blog today. The goal was to make it more readable and usable, and to refine the scope a bit. In the past I've covered various Office developer topics, but going forward I'll be focused 100% on Open XML, so I felt that required a few structural changes.

Here's one thing I learned that I'll pass on to others who are on Community Server blog platforms: not all skins are created equal. Specifically, I mean that different skins ("themes") have different CSS structure and that has a big impact on how easy it is to customize your blog.

For example, there are some sections in the sidebar that didn't get a unique div ID in my old theme (Simple) but do have an ID in my new theme (Vanilla), and that made it much easier to customize the sidebar with CSS overrides. So if you're struggling with how to customize something, try a different theme and see whether that simplifies the details.

One thing I still haven't figured out is how to sort the lists on the Links page. If anybody has a suggestion, I'd love to hear it. The frustrating thing is that the links are sorted alphabetically when you're in edit mode, but not when they're displayed. If there's really no option to sort the lists, I'll change that links page to a static page later, to give myself full control over the presentation details.

I changed the header photo "while I was at it." That other picture was taken last year at a bar after a couple of pints, and I felt it made me look a little more entertaining than I really am during the sober workday. Truth in advertising, you know.