New Template is Now Fully Operational

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in at 4/15/2014 12:30:00 AM
Dear readers, in case you haven't noticed--in which case I suggest laser eye treatment, pronto--the blog's template has changed. Over the weekend I have been tinkering with a new template to give the blog a contemporary look and feel. Since messing around with blog templates got me into this line of "business" in the first place, I have a keen interest on presentation. Ever come across blogs that had pretty good content but you didn't visit that much since they looked, well, blah? To better serve my beloved readers, I have always striven to deliver the best in form and function.

I suppose I am not doing too shabbily in either department since the blog still ranks third among Google search results for the term "international political economy." First is the (Humpty Dumpty-esque) Wikipedia entry, second is the excellent description of IPE by Michael Veseth that even I use. Fourth is the Warwick University IPE site--as a graduate of arch-rival Birmingham University I am glad to put them behind (just kidding, Warwick friends)! Fifth is the Review of International Political Economy, a fine journal edited by Greg Chin who I met a while ago.

Some notes in case you are interested:
  1. The blogroll has been moved to the footer area. One of the major innovations in web design has been moving a lot of content to this area, so I'm just keeping up. (From three columns we now move back to two columns, too.) Again, I do not necessarily agree with these blogs and sites, but I think they provides a fair representation of interesting material for the wide-ranging discipline that is IPE. Inactive links have been removed.
  2. All Foreign Policy blogs have been removed. What sort of jerks put blogs behind a paywall? It's totally against blogging ethos--even the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal which are the finest subscription-based sites do nothing of that sort of shameless money-grubbing. FP hucksters are thus banished. I will not register, let alone pay, for readily available content. A sucker is born every minute, but I hope you are not one of them.
  3. The blog title and description are now hard-coded into the header.
  4. The Archives and Tags sections have been combined in this neat template I found. For continuity's sake, familiar elements such as the textured background, the LibraryThing widget and the followers list carry over unchanged.
  5. The column width is now 1250 pixels. Most visitors to the blog have widths of 1280 or more, so it makes sense to make this move to maximize screen real estate. Ever visit sites that use only half the screen and have teeny-weeny text when viewed at 1920x1080 or higher? I certainly have, and they waste today's higher resolution screens. Previous templates dating from 2007 and 2008 were optimized for 1024x768 and 1280x800 screens that I was operating then, but time moves on. 
  6. All blog posts now have folds after a couple of lines on the main screen. For my next blog template, I will probably move to a title + picture template especially if readership keeps moving to mobile devices.
  7. The body font is now Open Sans. 
  8. There are still some things I am tinkering with such as the drop-down menus. I am also trying to shave off bits of HTML code here and there to speed up page loading by a few milliseconds. Pingdom suggests it loads reasonably fast already...
Otherwise, you are now witness to the firepower of this fully (re)armed and operational battle station. I target all forms of globaloney and hypocrisy. As it has for seven years now, the IPE Zone maintains its integrity by taking no prisoners. You may certainly not favor ideas and opinions expressed here, but rest assured they are mine alone. I do not entertain ads, paid placements, paywalls or other forms of commercial debasement. If you want people trying to sucker you into buying doodads at every turn, head elsewhere.

There will never be enough fish to fry even if I had all the time in the world.

PS: The new "Z" favicon is made to match the new color scheme. I am still deciding which of of the two above I should use.