As most of you probably know, I recently finished up with grad school; my portfolio and resume are more than three years old and therefore badly in need of updating, so of course the first thing I did was… redesign this here weblog. Here are a few of my thoughts behind the overhaul:

• I’ve been writing about food over at A Full Belly since April and I’ve really come to like being able to write short posts over there, which I’ve never been comfortable doing on here mainly because of how I’d laid the site out. So the biggest part of this redesign was switching the menu to the top and bottom of the pages to make room on the side for my new links log quick bites, mainly inspired by Andy, Simon Carless and, natch, Anil‘s late lamented sidebar. For those of you who prefer things syndicated, it comes with its own feeds: RSS 2.0 and Atom.
• If you read the site via RSS 2.0, you’ll now get to see the comments and trackbacks for every post. If you’d like to do the same with your feeds: Simple RSS Customization.
• No more static header graphic anywhere in the near future, no matter what I put up there I get sick of it eventually! I love being able to share my life via moblog with all my friends on Flickr and so I decided I would make the photos more accessible to my regular readers as well, hence the thumbnails of my nine most recent photos at the top of the page.
• Comments are awesome, but like Heather I too hate zeros. Current solution: make a little pixelly comment balloon in Photoshop and stick that in. I think it’s super cute but is it inviting enough? Do you prefer knowing how many people have commented already, or are you willing to break the ice? Please let me know, I’m more than happy to tweak with this for usability’s sake.

Next two things will be reintroducing a blogroll, as I’ve sorely missed having one, and finally (finally!) adding tags.