It’s been like that for two years, and there were a six things I wanted to change:

1. A title

I’ve always struggled with this – I like to be clear and descriptive, but most personal blog titles make me cringe. I also have a bad name for possessive apostrophes, so “Tom Francis’s Blog” is just painful. I used to avoid the issue by naming it something completely irrelevant, like ‘Ugly Fruit’ or at one point ‘Politics’. Then I avoided it by removing the name completely, so the last few iterations have had no title at all.

This time, I was determined to have one even if I immediately regretted it. After trying several I immediately regretted, I gave up and left it as the placeholder: “Tom Francis Regrets This Already”. I still regretted it, but neatly, the more I regretted it the more appropriate it became.

2. An intro

I looked at a lot of people’s personal sites to figure out how to improve mine, and it’s weird how many of them don’t explain who the hell the person is until you rummage around. In the spirit of explaining things to assholes, I really wanted to do a better job of that. The previous site did it in a few terse, reluctant words, so I tried to make it a bit friendlier this time.

I also think a lot of us are still under the impression that the ‘home page’ is where people arrive, and then they delve into the ‘post pages’ from there. In reality, most people discover sites when they’re linked to a particular page, so they’re more likely to see a particular post first. That’s why the new intro’s on every page.

3. Responsive design

Literally more than half of internet users are browsing from a mobile device now. And they vary wildly in resolution. I’ve never liked fixed-width designs, and I’ve never had one here, but previous versions all needed a resolution of at least 1024 pixels wide. They were basically useless on mobile phones.

Rather than make a separate mobile version, which’d scale badly to the huge middle ground between a Retina iMac and a first-gen smartphone, I’ve made the whole design resolution-agnostic. Try resizing the browser window – it should adapt all the way down to about 250 pixels wide, so it should be readable and usable on anything beyond a scientific calculator.

I’m also using Matt Wilcox’s Adaptive Images code to automatically resize images to your screen width before you download them, so smaller-res devices don’t download unnecessarily big images.

4. Bigger images

At the other end of the scale, it’s ridiculous how many sites look awful at 1920×1080. That’s by far the most common resolution now, and the internet at that res is a sad ocean of wasted space around unreadable text. I wanted to make sure everything expanded at high resolutions, and I particularly wanted big, sharp, colourful images. Most of the games I write about are gorgeous, and it always makes me sad to see them relegated to little thumbnails.

5. More featured posts

Previous designs did have a column for posts I wanted to highlight, but it was a clumsy JavaScript array I had to manually text-edit every time I wanted to add something new. So I never did. This time, I wanted those to be bold, colourful little badges, with clearer titles, and a much easier way to add to them. I can just add a tag to any post to add it to the rotation there, so I’ll be expanding that set as we go. You can also read all 30 with the link at the bottom of the right column.

6. Ways to subscribe

I realise not everyone uses an RSS reader – even Google, who make the best one, are basically abandoning it. I’m still keeping it, but I’ve now set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account that only ever post when I publish something here.

I think that’s it! Big thanks to Westley Knight, Jenn Frank and Graham Smith for testing and help. As ever, let me know in the comments if anything’s broken. If anyone’s interested in the stats, we’ve just passed 26,000 comments, this is roughly the 600th post (I deleted a few), and so far 1.4 million people have been here. Wow.

I seem to redesign this place at the start of every year – boredom with the old design peaks just as the winter break hits with the spare time to fix it. This new design is mostly just a visual jiggle, but I’m counting it as site number six because it’s no longer called James. I’m not good with titles, obviously, so it doesn’t really have one anymore – it’s just my blog, or Pentadact.com if you need something more unique.

I’ve sort of decapitated the old design:

It felt flabby and basic, and those black bars bothered me for no good reason. The new one fits more on the screen, and is a bit smoother. You’ll notice I’ve brought it bang up to date with the hottest web trend of 2003 – very slight gradients. A few other things are new:

• Infinite scroll: it loads the next bunch of posts when you scroll to the bottom. It doesn’t currently tell you it’s doing this.
• Like button: fucking Zuckerberg. That ugly little thing is so goddamn hard to put on any non-white page without making it hideous. I can’t resist them, though – they’ve been awesome on the PC Gamer site for letting us know the difference between pieces that people want to respond to, and piece people just… like. Without something filling that role, you never really know when you’ve done something right.
• Category tabs: browsing by category was a little obfuscated in the last design. I wanted to put them front and center for the sake of people who don’t care about games, since that topic often dominates this place a bit. Of course, which category link do the vast, vast majority of people click on? Games. They look at my site about games and think “Goddamn it, this isn’t enough about games! ONLY GAMES!”

As ever, please let me know what you think and if anything isn’t displaying right for you. I have some tweaking to do and presumably a lot of bug fixing, though it doesn’t look too disastrous so far.

James was taken offline last week by my hosts, BlueHost, because something was spamming my database of posts incredibly rapidly with incredibly demanding data requests. It was using up so much CPU on the server that it was slowing down every other site it hosts.

I was in New York meeting a nervous walrus at the time, so I couldn’t do much about it. Now that I’m back I’ve looked into it, done some maintenance, taken some precautions, and asked them to put it back online. The upshot is that it seems to be fixed for the time being, but I’m going to have to keep a very close eye on it for a while. If it goes down again, I’ll post updates on Twitter here.

If you’re interested in the technical specifics, here’s what I found:

• A few lines of malicious code have found their way back into my source code, despite my having changed my password and kept up to date with the latest WordPress updates since that last happened. I’ve removed them and changed my password again, to something ridiculous. Not sure if there’s anything I can do beyond that.
• One visitor, presumably robotic, immediately started loading the same page dozens of times a second within a few minutes of James going back up. I’ve banned its IP, but I don’t know how to prevent that kind of thing in general, or why it would cause slow SQL database queries.
• Something was accessing parts of the database that aren’t supposed to be public. After careful investigation I discovered that, on this occasion, it was myself: when I accessed the database directly to do some maintenance, it was taking 6 seconds or so just to display or select the tables. Further back, there are still calls to these private tables that I can’t explain. I choose to ignore both these problems.

Thanks for sticking around.

Turns out I liked dark blue in 1999 too. And I took my tea black? Was I ever that young?

Very nearly changed the name this time – for a long time the prototype read ‘Pentadact’ at the top. There’s every reason to make that change, not least of which is that people might finally spot that it doesn’t have a ‘u’ in it. But no matter how long I left it like that it just looked wrong. This obviously isn’t Pentadact – that’s me. It would be like calling my house Tom Francis.

The smallest change is the new visual motif; that didn’t take long. In a weird way I hope making it narrower has made it look wider – when it greedily filled the whole screen, it had no shape or size of its own. Filling the screen used to be one of my design commandments – I loathe sites that cower in a column on the left-hand side of any reasonably-sized display. Now, I’m starting to see that there are readability reasons why ultra-wide isn’t always awesome, and I prefer sites with a sense of place to sites with a design philosophy.

Weird, news-style proto-meta-blog

The idea behind the stuff in the sidebars – which took all the time – is that as much as possible, it should be different each time you come. Almost everything is either automatically-updating, easy to update, or just randomised. Instead of a static set of dozens of nameless thumbnail shots of things, I wanted to actually explain what each thing is that I’m featuring. But for the number of things I want to feature, that takes a prohibitively large amount of space. So instead, the template randomly chooses two items and I attempt to explain what they are.

I also wanted to dredge up some older stuff occasionally – hence the At Random panel. Blogs are all about what’s new, my sites never were: I like to create a load of stuff and leave it all hanging there, like so much dirty laundry. I’ve read everything on this site at least twice, and I wrote all of it, but even I see things cropping up in that box that make me think “What the hell was that?” If you ever see it blank, by the way, click the Full post link and let me know where it takes you. Every post is supposed to have an excerpt, but I think one or two slipped through the cracks.

Apparently I actually had other people submit reviews and stuff to the first James. I invented Web 2.0?

It’s not supposed to hit you in the face or anything, but there is a logic to what goes in the left as opposed to right sidebar. Left is stuff by me or on this site, and right is elsewhereville, things by other people that I liked. The Favourites panel is a solution to the problem of distinguishing between the types of places I link. I don’t link anyone’s blog unless I read every post of it, but that doesn’t always mean it’s essential reading I want to push on everyone. I wanted a separate place for the stuff I truly couldn’t live without, and to give it a little love. It’s also the first thing I did, and trying to articulate why you like your favourite sites is not a bad way to start a blog redesign.

The channels at the top were supposed to be a bigger deal than they’ve ended up being. I thought that since virtually no-one is interested in everything I talk about, and since I personally stop reading a blog after one or two posts I wasn’t interested in, it’d be useful to be able to filter it by topic. Everything here does legitimately fit into one of those, and if you’re an RSS user you can subscribe to each of the ones you care about to get a sort of custom feed. Update: stats show people really like to click the word ‘Games’ up there. Knock yourselves out, chaps!

I was fond, perhaps too fond, of the left-centre-right alignment pattern.

The subscription stuff is technically not new, but I want to highlight it this time: RSS means new posts get sent to you rather than you having to check for them, which in turn makes me feel less guilty about erratic posting. Jason L’s already requested the ability to subscribe to the comments that get made here, so I’ve implemented that too. Google Reader makes the internet a single page that can be read by repeatedly pressing a single key: Space. So at last, we can start out-evolving these pointless limbs. I’m just trying to help that along.

And as you’ve probably seen, I’m embedding MP3s a lot now – I’ll also add a direct download link for them soon. I want to post more than just music, and I’m thinking of a new regular related to that. I have 1.5 terabytes of storage space now, and ten times that in bandwidth, so I might as well put it to use.

2003 – first recognisably bloggy incarnation. Hopelessly dark.

Oh yeah, the hosting: James was long overdue for its own domain, I got constant complains about the acronymic URL (good luck spelling this one, whiners!), and the real reason: my ISP now sucks so hard that I have to leave them as soon as I humanly can. A load of providers now owned by Tiscali are now getting horrible service as people are moved to cheap, shitty servers in a bid for the parent company to turn a profit for the first time ever. So that really filled me with the warm glow of consumerism.

I chose BlueHost because a hundred blog posts told me to choose AN Hosting. I don’t know if you know this, but there are no longer any objective reviews of this kind of thing – every major company offers a huge cash kickback to bloggers sending new customers their way. The most trustworthy you get are the minority who admit they’re being paid to recommend you.

Holy shit I used to write a lot.

I almost went with AN Hosting anyway, but I happened to have their page up when I closed my browser for the day. It stopped me with a flashing alert claiming that a customer service representative for AN Hosting was trying to talk to me, and even lamely generated her (of course her) introductory lines. I almost spat. When I tried to close it, it generated another alert trying to panic me about that.

If these guys invent a cure for cancer, and I actually have cancer, they will still never see a penny of my money as long as I live, in cancery pain. BlueHost feel nice. Their CEO blogs. Their website lets you try out a dummy account. In fact, I like them so much I’m not going to link them, just so you know this isn’t a pay-per-post.

That would actually violate the prime directive of James, by the way, which is never to make money or sense.