New stuff. Woo! You'll note the sidebar is moved from the left to the right. The sidebar now appears after the content column in the code. You'll also note the sidebar no longer overlaps the content column. That feature was pretty, but a huge pain in the ass. I always had to be careful with where I placed floats and I was never able to get all the cross browser margins sorted out.

Under the hood, the entire template was rewritten from scratch. Before this, I'd been using the same template for the better part of a year. Constant tweaking and an endless parade of plugins running through with dirty feet was beginning to leave my code a little muddled. Well, no more. Now it's cleaner and more organized. It's easier for me to maintain and easier for the curious to sort out what I'm doing when they view the source. Sadly, this rewrite left the other blog skins behind. I may add some of them back later. Maybe. The older skins might not work quite so well with the big new feature…

…the new sidebar! You'll see the sidebar is now broken into separate boxes. If you click the title bar of any box, you can click and drag to reorder the sidebar to your liking. If you check the right end of each box's title bar, you'll see a little arrow icon. Click that arrow and the box will contract. Click it again and it will expand. So each user now has the ability to collapse the sidebar items they use infrequently and to reorder the sidebar to place the items they use often at the top. Best of all, and unlike my previous setup, your preference will be remembered between visits.

WordPress users might recognize the idea behind the sidebar. I stole it from the WP post editor. When I first started using WP I thought, "Wow, that's cool. How does that work?" When I finally got around to digging into it I leaned it's a script from Brothercake called docking boxes. All the supermagic voodoo should be compatible with IE6/7, Opera 8/9 and Firefox 1.0.x/1.5.x/2 (and anything else using Gecko 1.7 or better).

There are new goodies in the sidebar, too. The old Meta section is now expanded into three separate, more logical sections. I've also added my del.icio.us links, a list of recent links to me and a custom flickr badge.

I've been beating this new template into shape for the past week or two and it think it's finally polished enough to "go live." Of course, I'll probably be chasing bugs for the next month as I find little things that slipped under the radar the first time around. If you could help out with that a bit, I'd appreciate it. Be a pal and let me know if you find anything wonky, won't you?

I tweaked the post byline a little bit. What was one long line that (on most screen sizes) would wrap into several lines, is now two separate lines. Category and tag links now appear on a second line beneath the other meta information.

I was starting to get annoyed by the fact that the addition of tags would always wrap the comment link onto the next line. Differing numbers and length of tags were making it so the comment link never appeared in exactly the same place twice. That blows. If having to look for the comment link annoyed me, I'm pretty sure it annoyed you twice as much.

So yeah, that's fixed. The first byline will basically always remain the same length, so the comment link will be in the same spot on every post. Much better, I think.

I'm also experimenting with adding a fingerprint to my site feed, which is the real reason for this post. I'm sure you would have noticed and adapted to the byline change without me pointing it out. But I need a new post to test the feed settings.

The feed now has a footer containing two paragraphs. The first paragraph, the one I want visible, is:

© Some rights reserved. Licensed by Creative Commons.

Be a pal and please let me know if your feed reader displays that paragraph, the hidden paragraph after it, neither or both.

I'm more or less constantly tweaking this blog. At least a couple of times a week I try something or other new. Most of the time my tweaks aren't really noteworthy. It's usually the kind of thing where if people notice, they notice. If they don't, oh well.

Today I've a tweak worth talking about.

But first, the pretty. I've added a spiffy drop shadow effect around user gravatars and a default grav for users without. The drop shadow uses a second image and is really nothing more than a CSS trick. Because it's not a plugin and doesn't require PHP, this particular effect will work on any blog (although it would be of limited usefulness on something like Blogger, where styled comments don't have gravatars).

Is anyone interested in seeing the CSS I've used to create this effect? (Somebody say yes. You know I'm going to talk about it soon anyway.)

Second, the new feature. All users now have the ability to edit their own comments within five minutes of submitting them. This feature will work for any user, and will even work if you close and reopen your browser.

So if ever you find yourself reviewing a comment you've just posted and you find a misspelling or whatnot that you'd like to fix, look for the new Edit link in your comment's byline.

To make this new feature a little easier to use, I've also adjusted the comment post redirect. Previously, posting a comment would reload the page with your comment a part of it, leaving you at the top of the page. Now it works a little different. Posting a comment will reload the page and take you to the comment you've just left so you can review it if you choose.

I'd like to ask you all to be my guinea pigs with this. I always have the ability to edit any comment, so I don't see the same things you do. I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if ever the edit link appears a little wonky or if the function doesn't work as expected.

This post right here is my 989th on this blog. In honor of this impending landmark, I've spruced the place up a bit. When I first chose as my domain feastofcrumbs.com, I originally intended to change the title of this blog to "A Feast of Crumbs."

But of course my template, with that very distinctive masthead, was pretty much tied to the name "Eat at The Fish's." So I needed a new blogskin. But beating WordPress into shape and, you know, actually blogging some shit now and then always pushed the new skin onto the back burner.

Days turned into weeks and then months. It's been almost six months since I started this new blogskin and it's finally finished. Rather I should say that it's as finished as I'll ever allow a design to be. You know I tinker with these damn things constantly.

In any event, it's certainly good enough to use and now seems an excellent time to unveil it. I know, I'm a bit early for my 1000th, but I'm having guest posters. The 1000th post might not even be mine.

Because of the stylesheet shuffle, some of you may find your previous stylesheet choice no longer works. You may even find this page using no style at all. This is not unexpected. Everytime I mess with the stylesheet switcher, it seems to invalidate everyone's cookie. Not to worry, just make a choice from the skins menu in the sidebar and your cookie should be refreshed.

I would also appreciate any feedback on the new skin, particularly with regards to anything that might look a little wonky.

So what do you all think of the new decor?

I do have something to talk about today.

Check the sidebar. In an effort to clean up clutter, I converted the Archive, Category, Blogroll and Meta lists to hidden-by-default peek-a-boos. So I have questions for you all. First, does the show/hide functionality work for everyone? Second, does anyone have any interest in a toggle for the entire sidebar? Third, if I decide to implement a toggle, does anyone have an idea for keeping the BlogExplosion thumbnail visible when the sidebar is closed?

…a little frisky today. So I've decided to take a suggestion and have a poll about the red background color. Cast your vote below.