Looks AMAZING.

Gah! I do not like this because I am resistant to change! *Vader voice* Nooooooooooooooo!

Noah

p.s. That was a joke.

Quite snappy and clean. Dunno about the white, though. Black seems more your shade. It’s slimming.

Looks real good, man.

Thankee, peeps.

@Keith — Well, I figure there comes a time when a man must stop wearing black all the damn time. The black t-shirts. Coats. Boots. Jeans. Sneakers. Balaclavas. Synthetic-stock shotgun. Black cloth money bag. Y’know. All that.

What? No. I don’t rob banks. Who said that? You shut up.

The white allows the text to be read easier (and given various responses on Twitter, that was a problem for some people). Plus, if I want to really embrace the “ink” motif, it seemed apropos to go black logo on white backdrop.

This theme has a black (not gray — but deep, surly Oblivion Black) mode, as well as a blue and a red. I almost went with the blue, with white logos and graphics.

But the white really popped. Crisp. Good typography. Allows the writing to be read, which is the primary goal.

– c.

I like it, all over. The only thing I don’t really dig is that the elements seems so large, like I have the wrong resolution selected. That is purely personal taste though!

I also noted that you apparently have ended your love affair with witty doormats. Seems like your going and getting all professional on us, Magic Talking Beardhead. No more black coat, white shoes, black hat, Cadillac.

Yeah. The boy’s a time bomb. White pants, blue shirt, little hat, and a boat.

Yeah. The boy’s the Skipper.

Two actual comments though – You might want to darken the font just a tad. The dark-gray is a little hard to distinguish in large white fields, like in your “What has Chuck written” area. It’s fine in an actual text-entry box, where the font is way dark.

Also, it isn’t saving Gravatar information. What’s up with that? Is this some kind of message? Are you calling my fingers lazy? Fat? Do you have a thing for chubby fingers? I can send pictures for the right price.

Dear Rick Carroll:

I will send you five dollars American, which should be more than enough to feed your family for a year when translated to Canadian Wampum. I will also send you some shiny buttons that you can trade to your people for whale pornography.

This should be more than enough to cover your expenses for sending me fine Polaroids of your sausagey fingers. I will pretend that my sausagey fingers are touching yours when I hold the photos.

Love, The Magic Talking Beardhead

Oh — erm, two real comments!

The font, the dark gray on white. Do you mean the one that all the blog posts and pages are in? To my eye, it’s very easy to read, so I wonder if it’s a monitor issue? I’d like to hear from others on this, though. I’m not a CSS-hound, but if necessary I’m sure I can scare up the font information.

Would making the font a hair bigger help? Or are we all on board again with the smaller font? Whatever makes it easy for the peeps to read.

As for Gravatar info — errm? That, I have no idea. Are other people experiencing the same? I don’t know what voodoo governs that, honestly.

– c.

I must agree on the font color. It’s a tad light and I find myself squinting a bit. Also it seems that I have been logged out of my account here and there isn’t an obvious place to log into my account here.

I’m just testing something here. Ignore the man behind the curtain.

– c.

Nice! Very clean layout, easy on the eyes, though I agree the font is a bit too light. I think the font color setting is in your .css stylesheet (Dashboard > Appearance > Editor); depending on how complicated the theme is, you should be able to find it by searching “color”.

I’d suggest a bit more content in the sidebar, too. A recent comments widget and your Twitter feed, perhaps?

Finally, I HIGHLY recommend these plugins:

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button (http://www.addtoany.com/)
Topsy Retweet Button (http://labs.topsy.com/widgets/wordpress)
WordTwit (http://www.bravenewcode.com/wordtwit)
WPtouch iPhone Theme (http://www.bravenewcode.com/products/wptouch/)

You can find all via the Dashboard for one-click installation.

Guy:

Awesome, thank you. Will look into all of that.

The theme is actually pretty dang complicated, so I’m not sure where the color hides.

Content in the sidebar is forthcoming — I just want to make sure that my plug-ins don’t asplode anything again, and I also want to figure out what actually belongs there. I can do a recent comments widget, but I personally find those sidebars of dubious value. The Twitter feed is coming, but the Lifestream plug-in really fuckered the site with this theme in play, so I have to find a good plug-in to do what I want. (The one that came with the LA theme is half-broken and only displays tweets some of the time.)

– c.

re: Recent Comments, you have such an active group here, having their latest comments in the sidebar is both a nice shout-out as well as a sign of activity, esp. for anyone coming into the site via an older post. More a nice-to-have than a must-have, though.

re: Twitter feed, the cleanest route is plugging Twitter’s own code (http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_profile) into the Text widget.

Also, just noticed you don’t have a Subscribe to RSS feed option visible; that’s how I keep up-to-date on the more prolific bloggers I follow.

@Guy:

Recent comments: Will poke and ponder.

Twitter feed: Not a big fan of the Twitter widget, honestly. Plus, a lifestream is more robust (links to new Tumblr pages and what not).

RSS: Anybody know how to configure a page to go straight to a link instead of to a page? ‘Cause I put put an RSS feed in the page bar. For the moment, I have it as a Simple Image link in the sidebar.

Put in a recent comments sidebar feed — thoughts? Mine are, I don’t much like it — it’s a context-free list. No actual comments listed. Maybe there’s a more robust plug-in available.

Another weird goblin: my subscribe-to-comments plug-in is installed and active, but doesn’t appear to be working.

– c.

Gotcha on the Twitter widget! re: Lifestream, if you aggregate everything through Friendfeed, perhaps there’s a plugin that presents it cleanly?

If you do find a good lifestream option and the secret to page as link, let me know; you’re making me think it’s time to give loudpoet a makeover, too!

Your point is well made on the “Back off Black.” I’m a fan of white m’self. Not only does it make things easier on the eyes, but I find that images with transparent backgrounds clip less and have sharper edges.

It has been *years* for terrible minds in black. I think you’re right; time for a change.

Your bottom bar might be a little wide, or need a graphic or two for the home and contact links to fill the space.

I must say that I love, love love the slideshow. I looked at something similar for my upgrade by I lacked the photo file to do it justice. You, my friend, have a fine resource to delve into. The index format is also something that I’m a fan of, and I think it works well for you.

Sweet look, indeed.

Test.