Justin Thorn

Its been a very long time since I have made a blog post. In fact it has been 5 months since my last post. Since then the site slowly started falling apart. Over the years I have leapfrogged from one free blogging service to the next. The last one I was using went under and closed up shop leaving my blog out in the cold. I guess you “get what you pay for”. Rather than quickly jumping to another free service and risk the same fate I chose to take a few months off and search for a better solution. Thanks to Wordpress I have finally found that solution. Let me take you on a quick tour of all the powerful new features of my new site.

The most obvious change are the four navigation tabs at the top. Home and Archives are pretty self explanatory. The photos section features all my Flickr photos in album format. You can flip through photos one at a time and comment on them individually or for the best results choose the view slideshow link for a full screen view. The Lifestream tab is the one your probably least familiar with. This is just a constant stream of mini posts that are updated daily. These consist of things like Facebook and Twitter status updates, recent links I’ve dugg, games I’m playing and more. Chances are if there are no new blog posts there is probably still something new in the lifestream. It has its own page to keep things from being too cluttered.

Some new obvious and not so obvious features of the Home page. There are several buttons in the top corner of the page. Buttons to quickly subscribe to the RSS feed for all blog posts on the site, links to my Facebook and Twitter accounts and six of my other social profiles. Digg news stories, Flickr account, YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, LastFM music, and my Raptr gaming profile. Below that are 6 of the latest lifestream events followed by list of links to Laurens sites, friends, and fun sites I recommend. Followed by a few widgets for my recently played games, music and gadgets. Last but not least at the bottom of the sidebar are Topics and Tags. Topics are essentially categories and Tags are sub-categories or subjects. Every blog post gets assigned topics and tags to help keep things organized. As an example, if your only interested in Personal blog posts or those mentioning pepperdog you can select those links and then subscribe to the RSS feed for just those posts. I realize its a power user feature most people won’t need or use but its nice to have the option.

As the web increasingly becomes more social so have blog posts. That is why I each post has several ways to easily share with others. In the top right are three buttons to Digg a post, Tweet about it, or share on Facebook. At the bottom of the post there are also several other buttons for printing, bookmarking, or sharing on other social profiles. Thanks to the Disqus comment system its easy to develop a conversation on a post and follow the replies. In order to reduce spam I do not allow anonymous comments so you will have to login first. Fortunately you can use your Facebook or Twitter login if you have one. If not its easy to quickly signup for a free Disqus account. Don’t worry none of your login information is stored on my servers or Disqus.

Well that concludes our tour. Let me know what you think of the new site and any suggestions or technical problems you have experienced.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention if you access this site from your iPhone or other smartphone you will get a special version made for mobile devices.