If you’re viewing this via your favorite web browser, you’ve probably noticed that things look very different than last time. If you’re reading this from your favorite RSS reader, come on over and check things out.

I’ll be providing many more posts in the near future with all sorts of things learned from this redesign (subscribe to the feed if you haven’t already to keep up with those), but I just wanted to do a quick overview post to quickly point out a few things.

The design

This is a fairly big difference from the past couple of designs I’ve had on here, but I think it’s a good change. I wanted to draw more attention to what I do (i.e., I would like to get hired more), and I also wanted to add some more interactivity (more on that later).

The design process for this design was quite a long one and involved several renditions, so I’ll definitely be posting more on that soon.

The code

This is what most of you will probably be interested in. As I’ll be going more in-depth in future posts, I just want to do a quick snapshot of some of the new stuff:

  • I’ve used Nathan Smith’s excellent 960.gs framework. I’ll definitely be using this in my future projects as well.
  • I’ve switched to jQuery as a JavaScript framework, and I love it. Check out the Explore tab up top, the AJAX lifestream in the sidebar, and my contact form for a few examples of some of the JavaScript work I’ve done on here.
  • In a similar note, I’ve re-built Better-Than-Live AJAX Search as a jQuery plugin. To test it out, open up the Explore tab and do a search (and yes, this will be released in the near future).

There’s still a few kinks to be worked out, but overall it should be all up-and-running. And as always, I’d love to hear everybody’s thoughts, opinions, critiques, comments or whatever else you’d like to call them.