I’ve pretty much been working on the new site day and night. It’s finally finished – I hope you all like it!

Note: I had a slight hiccup and had to take the site back down again – had some troubles with the layout not playing nice in IE8 (I didn’t realise, because I had IE6 and it looked fine – I really wish I could punch IE in the face, honestly). But that’s why I love having the Maintenance Mode plugin – if I find that my site has a big problem, I can hide it for a little while, while I fix things. With a hammer.

After a lot of kicking, screaming, sobbing, sulking, some choice naughty words and an air of general crankiness (you could say I don’t like to be beaten), I think it is fixed now; mostly thanks to a gnome friend giving me a hand. Always go to gnomes for tech help, they know their stuff.

He diagnosed a mild case of PEBKAC and we fixed it right up.

So I’m feeling a little sheepish, but now it should show up nicely in various browsers. Hopefully. If you notice that there are formatting problems in your browser, can you please let me know? Just be gentle – I know very little about CSS and I’ve really tried hard to make this a much better site than the old one. I’m hoping there aren’t any major bugs though – I don’t want to take the site down again now that it’s up.



The new stuff:
  • I’ve added a contact page that shows you how to contact me:
    • I have a new email address, so you can now email me at my treebarkjacket address instead of my personal address. I don’t mind people using my other address of course, but this is so much nicer!

    • I’ve also added a contact form so that you can send questions and suggestions straight from this site.
    • Finally, I’ve added an upgraded version of cbox in the sidebar, so that you can leave me short messages on the fly.
  • You should now have the ability to edit your comments (no more typos or double posts preserved for all to see), plus you can add smilies to your comments! :)
  • The subscribe button in the sidebar should give you a whole list of different subscription options, including email. I need to get a Feedburner feed happening at some point but it wasn’t working for me while I’ve had my site in Maintenance Mode, so I’ll worry about that later.
  • You should also be able to choose to subscribe to comments on individual posts.
  • TBJ now has a favicon – a Tree Bark Jacket! Just for fun.
  • You should now see some possibly related posts on the end of each article.
  • I’ve installed a plugin called Better Search, which is a hundred times better than the default WP search function. It should serve up results to you based on relevance, not just every post (in date order) that contains your search terms (ick). I really wanted to make this site more user-friendly than the old one, so I hope this plugin helps.
  • Categories and tags – I promise I will be diligent this time and always include a category! Luckily I have installed a plugin that won’t let me post an article without a category. Exactly the kind of thing that I need.



New Pages

You’ll see that I have added some static pages in the navbar at the top and on the sidebar. I particularly wanted to have a menu page for guides, so that people could find them easily.

The sidebar pages are for past and future druid changes, and changes on the way in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. They are pretty straightforward but I’ll be highlighting these pages and explaining them in another post soon.

I’ve also created a guide for starting your own Warcraft blog; there will be a separate post about this, too, soon. :)


Please let me know if:

I have tested the site in a couple of different browsers, but if you happen to come across something that isn’t working properly, please let me know.

Some things I’d really appreciate:
  • If you find a broken link, image, or something generally seems to not be working, please contact me.

  • If you’d like to be on my blogroll, please send me your link (and if you would like, a 202 x 44 banner).
  • Please update your bookmarks, links, and feeds.
  • Please be gentle on me if you spot any sloppy code. I honestly don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m always willing to learn how to do things better, but for now if you could ignore my disgraceful abuse of deprecated html, that’d be swell..


Some things that may/may not be working yet:

  • Avatars on comments – if they’re not working, I’ll have to fiddle with it.

  • My comments in a different colour – I had problems with this, it’s not hugely important but it would be handy to be able to tell my comments apart at a glance.


The site should generally be working, but there may be some minor tweaks to be made.

Note that in future I will also be making use of the “more” tag so that the front page isn’t fifteen feet long.

Welcome to the new TBJ! I hope you like it.

Now I can sleep. And play some Warcraft. And get some eye drops.



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