Okay, now. This isn’t like a totally new blog or anything, but it’s the first post since its revamp. Some changes explained for the readers coming in from The Abridged Ajani:

• New Name

“The Staccato Slur” pretty much sums up nicely what the newer ajanimgo.com will be like – personal and maybe more meditative, with the presentation of staccato (random, or rather, not having a thematic structure over time) thoughts and writing, but yet having a slur in writing, a certain inertia in thought and need to unify the diverse notes into a decent melody – an articulated smoothness that comes from the linkage and consideration of seperate philosophies and events, but yet not precisely legato, which seems to connote a flow that naturally “goes without saying”.

“An aesthete to save us all” is the new tagline, which has replaced the old “Condensed for the Chic” which was far too cheesy and overused, both in the old Abridged Ajani and the new Staccato Slur. The new tagline rocks, however, because it does mean something personal. Romanticism today will save one from the dangerous despair of existentialism.

• Proper Branding

Quite a decent bit of work has gone into The Staccato Slur’s branding; you will notice quite prominently, a header banner that will be representative of what this entire revamping project stands for – Foucault; Nietzsche and Sartre and their influence upon my ethos and thought. Don’t worry about Foucault though – he looks stressed and Nietzsche looks hungry but they are only playing a game of Scissors, Paper, Stone.

I am trying to find as many avenues to personalize this site as far as possible – mainly by writing. Design-wise I have made only few changes on the most significant aspects e.g. header of the site because yes, this theme I am using now is an excellent theme, which brings us to the next point.

• New Theme and Look

My previous theme was “Freshy 2“. It was good, no doubt, but it lacked the ease of customization of the theme I now have defected to – “Mandigo“. I found no reason to however attempt customization beyond what would be immediately obvious to the reader. The background which the main frame of the content sits on by default, for instance, I thought was a perfect fit already.

• AJAX Navigation

On a more technical note, I have installed a new AJAX plugin on the site. Its benefits however is easily observed; as you navigate on the site, switching pages and reading posts, you will notice that instead of having to face a conventional page-loading process, a rather more sleek loading process kicks in and you see Auguste Rodin’s Le Penseur impatiently dozing off to the loading process in the middle of the page – the Zs mark the loading of the page. Well, perhaps it’s best empirically observed to get what I mean – so go clicking. I thought this new feature to contribute to the user experience, above all.

And yes, I had got a bit creative with the capabilities of the plugin in order for Le Penseur to serve me as such – the default animation loaded was actually that of a boring throbber you see everywhere nowadays on Web 2.0 sites e.g. Facebook, so I made the decision to create the animation you see now.

Unfortunately, if you take a quick look on your browser’s address bar, the plugin does not generate nice, memorable URLs as it does its work. Well, honestly, the plugin’s engine’s in some Javascript foreign to me and as such, too bad huh, I have no idea how to tweak it properly to give you nice URLs to look at. I have however posted a comment with the plugin’s author on the issue, but meanwhile just bear with the unsightful side effect for the greater beauty of watching The Thinker in sleep.

• Visitor Statistics

Well, you wouldn’t notice much of this, it’s meant to be invisible to all save for me. I have upgraded my phpMyVisites installation to the much updated Piwik. As of the time of writing however there’s some potentially long-term technical barriers against me using Piwik, so hmm… This is not something I’m able to definitively confirm now. But don’t worry – there’s nothing that sucks for you.

• Creative Commons

The Creative Commons licenses are going to be referenced at the end of every piece of writing ideally to give each piece of writing of mine their due copyright status, since I thought that I might be writing more than just essays on The Staccato Slur now, but also novels, perhaps uploading too films and drawings if I have the mood for them. This replaces the generic fit-all Attribution-Noncommercial license used earlier, so look carefully! But well, I’m a nice guy – I’m not going to sue you lest you grossly violate the spirit of the sharing of human knowledge.

My writings will hopefully be friendlier to the reader, above all. I will remind myself to introduce every concept I make reference to, holding the assumption that none of my readers are acquainted with the outlooks and ideas I quote. Guess these should be all the changes I made or will be making consciously, anyway.

Well, welcome to The Staccato Slur.

Tags: aesthete, customization, despair, existentialism, foucault, header banner, inertia, linkage, nietzsche, no doubt, philosophies, playing a game, pretty much sums, revamping, romanticism, sartre, scissors paper stone, smoothness, tagline, thematic structure

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 7:09 pm and is filed under The Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.