The launch of robertnyman.com!

So finally I have my own domain! A big thank you to Henrik Box at southside.se who has been hosting my different projects during a long time!
This move will, except for an easier domain name, mean enchanced stability and functionality. I’ve left Blogger and started using WordPress. Blogger was a bit shaky and couldn’t offer all of the functionality that I was looking for, so a switch of blogging tool was due.

Search functionality is available in the sidebar to the right and all posts are categorized. I guess many of them will be labeled General, but still I hope it will distinguish certain posts from the rest, e.g. posts about XHTML.

The new commenting system requires of you to enter your e-mail adress, however it’s just for my sake and will not be publicly displayed nor given out to anyone.
It’s stability is a vast improvement from the previous one, and the color coding will hopefully make it more easy on the eye to read.

There are also a number of RSS feeds available:

RSS 2.0 at http://www.robertnyman.com/feed/
RSS 2.0 (just the comments) at http://www.robertnyman.com/comments/feed/
RSS .92 at http://www.robertnyman.com/feed/rss/
Atom 0.3 at http://www.robertnyman.com/feed/atom/

Given the discussion in Why XHTML?, this page is using content negotiation, which means that it serves XHTML 1.0 Strict as application/xhtml+xml to those web browsers who are capable of handling that, and HTML 4.01 Strict to those who aren’t.

Want to know more about me?

Please let me know what you think about the new design, functionality and, of course, the content. If you find anything that doesn’t work, please let me know.

Happy reading and welcome!

20 Comments

  • Box says:

    Let me be the first one to congratulate to for getting a "real" domain, the url is much better and easier to remember. The design on this new one seems much nicer and easier to read. I really like the calendar function on the right! Keep up the good work!

  • Robert says:

    Thank you, and thanks for the hosting!

  • Dejan says:

    Congratulations Robert, and I hope you will have even more visitors.

  • Robert says:

    Dejan, thank you!

  • markus says:

    King, dudster. Still having that sad feeling of separation? =)

  • Robert says:

    markus, thanks!

    Of course I will miss not getting the chance to work with you!

  • markus says:

    Change is good. Chances are few. Or something.

  • Robert says:

    Well, yes..

    But sad too.

  • Tommy Olsson says:

    Well done!

    The masthead image may be a bit on the large side for dial-up users (98KB!), but that's what caching is for, isn't it?

    From an accessibility point of view, I'm not too fond of using only colour to distinguish links from copy text. They should at least be bold or underlined, IMHO.

    But apart from that minor "flaw", it's looking great. The comment system seems to be a lot better than your old site's, too. πŸ™‚

    I'll add your site to my blogroll.

  • Robert says:

    Jeroen,

    Thank you!
    The domain and blogging tool change was a must.
    After about 48 very intensive hours with WordPress, I must say that I like it so far.
    It has some quirks, as all tools do, but generally it does the trick.

    PHP (the coding language used for WordPress) maybe isn’t the language of the gods, but it’s ok.
    Also, if one misses some feature or similar, there’s always someone that has already fixed it (Scriptygoddess comes to mind).

    I have to think about the masthead image…
    I like it (maybe too much), so it might be a case of kill your darlings.
    We’ll see. πŸ™‚

    Thanks for the RSS subscription!
    I hope I can lure you in with some interesting posts in the future.

  • Robert says:

    Tommy,

    Thank you very much!

    > The masthead image may be a bit on the large side for dial-up users (98KB!), but that’s what caching is for, isn’t it?

    Yes, hopefully it'll be a one-time problem for people with dial-up like you, thanks to the magic of caching. πŸ™‚

    > From an accessibility point of view, I’m not too fond of using only colour to distinguish links from copy text.

    I agree, and that hadn't really been thought through by me. Underlining of links is now restored.

    > The comment system seems to be a lot better

    Oh, definitely! Now people will maybe even like reading and posting comments. πŸ™‚

    > I’ll add your site to my blogroll.

    Thank you! That means a lot, since I think you always write very good articles. I really liked 'Doctype Declarations and Content-Type Headers'. A must read for everyone.

  • Brilliant! Good to see you got yourself a nice domain along with good ol' WordPress. I am always interested in hearing people's opinion about WordPress, as I am seriously considering switching to it as well..

    I'll say that I truly love the photography at the top. Being on ADSL I am not easily concerned about large images, especially not when they look as nice as this. The colourscheme and the 2 pixel border around the site are great — I just love something as subtle as that border!

    I can imagine the large top image to be disturbing for a certain type of visitor though — wouldn't it be an idea to downsize the image to around 60 – 80 pixels high for pages other than the frontpage?

    Moved you up into my Thunderbird's RSS list as well. Looking forward to reading your ideas πŸ™‚

  • Robert says:

    In all fairness, credit has to be given where credit is due.

    The look of this site is based on the Falling Leaves theme by Shawn Grimes.

    I've done lots of small fixes to it, some minor (and some major) tweaks in presentation etc.

    But, as Jeroen mentioned above, I really like the subtle border and the general look of it as well, so it looks pretty much like Shawn's original design.

    Hence, the masthead image is even more important to differentiate it from his original design.

  • Robert says:

    Jeroen,

    I caved in. πŸ™‚

    I use the big image on the front page and a smaller header on the other pages (except for the About page), for greater readability and better overview.

    Thanks for the advice!

  • Julia says:

    Hi Robert. Welcome to the wonderful world of WordPress πŸ™‚

    Just one small niggle re the layout. The Adlinks by Google is pushed out of the wrapper in Opera 7.54 (my favourite browser). It is fine in Firefox and IE6 (all tested on Windows).

    Adding you to my feeds now, of course.

    back to work now……got a database to design for college. πŸ™

  • Julia says:

    Oh just noticed—-there is also a white box at the bottom left of the screen under the wrapper in Opera 7.54 too. Why does Opera have to be different?

  • Robert says:

    Julia,

    Thanks for the input.

    The Opera problem is now fixed, I had only tested it in Opera 7.02 (to read more about my musings about Opera, please go to 'Opera').

    I'm happy I've become one of your feeds!

  • Julia says:

    looking good now….:-)

  • Robert says:

    Great! Thanks for letting me know.

  • […] h out, so I translated the posts I had written so far into English. April 11th last year, I launched this domain and presented the blog now migrated to WordPress, a mo […]