Vegan Bicyclinguist Logo

Vegan Bicyclinguist

An occasional thought from a vegan bicyclist language-lover

2009 Brings the Vegan Bicyclinguist

Posted: Sunday, January 4th, 2009 – 7:14 pm

I know the words minor overhaul seem logically incompatible, because well, an overhaul entails massive amounts of work. Logical incompatibilities aside, I'm proud to announce that I finished completing a minor overhaul of the site as a way to start out the 2009 year with a few new features and a slightly modified look. I want to run through a few of the details:

Renaming and Color Scheme Change

When I redid my site back in 2007, I plastered my name over the top of the site. Over time I felt sort of weird doing that, so I went with a trend other vegan bloggers have done and give it a name. After much pondering, I settled on vegan bicyclinguist which is sort of a cognitive blend of three big areas of interest for me: vegan stuff, bicycling, and linguistics/language. Most of my posts center on the vegan aspect, but I hope to include more posts about bicycling and language. The name is maybe a bit cutesy, but it is who I am, so no apologies here. I also made what I think is cute, maybe simplistic, logo as well. If you bookmark my site, the logo will be associated with it.

I really liked the existing layout of the page, so I decided to keep that stable. To give the site a newer look, I changed some of the fonts around and went with a darker, more monochromatic color scheme. This change doesn't affect the print style sheet too much, which hides the non-essential elements when printing posts.

Syndication

Syndication is a great mechanism to add to a blog. It allows folks to set their RSS or Atom aggregator/feed reader to your page, and it will grab new content whenever you make it available. This eliminates having someone check your site daily to see if there's any new content, perhaps to be disappointed that there is none. Many sites out there are dedicated to aggregating content from a series of sites on a related topic, such as Veg Blogs.

I've written my own feed pushing software for RSS and Atom. Feel free to subscribe to whichever fits your aggregating software best, and here's for hoping I push out enough new content in 2009 to make it worthwhile!

Back End Rewrite

For those who might take an interest, I've rewritten all of the PHP code on the backend to be completely object-oriented, which is PHP can sometimes be something of a feat. The code is much easier to follow (I hope), and writing the RSS and Atom feeds became a total no brainer once it was all in place. You won't notice anything on the front end with this, but if you're curious in the inner-workings, please drop me an email.

Here's for hoping 2009 is a productive year!

Comments (0)