Some More Blog House Cleaning

Every so often I like to look at various aspects of my blog and tinker with them. It’s nice to change things up a little bit but after doing a new blog theme for my site, Robyn pointed out the new layout lacked some items it previously had that she liked. The Categories on the sidebar and the Navigation links on the single page.

I remember reading (not that I remember where) that as a web designer what you should do is get your friends and family to play with a layout you create, watch over their shoulders to see what they do. See where they go to click or what they do when navigating around a page. This I find helps when making your page easier to navigate for general users.

With Categories, Robyn liked to see if there was any other posts related to a particular Category I have on my blog, she could do that easily with my previous layout but not with the current one. So I added it back to the sidebar to help her and others who might find it useful. I also went through some of the Categories and removed some of the ones that were either redundant or didn’t make sense.

I also added the previous post link and next post link (if applicable) at the top of each single page which is dynamically generated anyway by WordPress. I made the font smaller and removed the weight so it does not interfere with the post’s title as much as it used to.

Contact Forms Fixed

Flickr Photo By Pink Sherbet Photography

I had an issue with my contact forms, though I am unsure how long I have actually have had the issue. If you were trying to get a hold of me via my contact forms and did not hear back please try again.

The email address I use for all my online dealings is hosted by Google’s Domain Apps and I was not receiving email from DynamicShark.com via the contact form I have created there either. The odd part was that the contact form worked fine if I sent the message to another email address but not to a Gmail account. I could also send the contact form data to the proper location when it was on my development server here at home, just not when it was on my live servers.

It turns out that my webhost (Bluefur) had a default set up so that if the scripts were running locally off of it, it was being smart and taking the  message and rerouting it to it’s own mail servers (that’s where my domain/websites are hosted of course). Though because the email portion of my account is not set to handle my domain mail at Bluefur,  it was just dumping my messages into /dev/null, sort of like a blackhole.

Tech Support for Bluefur was great at troubleshooting the issue with me and helped fix the issue relatively quickly.

My contact forms are working properly now so feel free to use them if you need to get a hold of me.