Some blog updates

I have been making some minor changes to the blog and will attempt to complete them over the next week. I thought about converting to a 3 column format but decided against it given how many of the readers seem to have a screen resolution of around 1024 (width). When I get really bored, or have too much free time, I'll consider more drastic changes.

I guess I'm still a caveman but it's amazing how many people use RSS feeds (link at the top left of the page.) I started using feedburner and, although it's hard to tell how many are real subscribers that read every post, it seems almost as many people read my posts using RSS feeds as the number that visits the site.

I added a menu bar at the top to make it easier to access certain information (thanks to GardenBlogger for blog hacking tips and CSS Library for the free menu bar.) The menu bar isn't active right now but will be made active once the underlying pages are up. Since this is a blog and not a website with static pages, there are going to be some workarounds for some pages. I'll be posting a few pages in the future that will be continuously updated. These will be pages listing my favourite websites/blogs, my portfolio holdings, and so on. You can always access these pages from the menu bar at the top. I'm going to remove the lists on the left column given how they couldn't accomodate large number of items without looking clumsy.

I added a new comment engine from IntenseDebate. This slows down the page loading time but I needed something better than the default blogger commenting system. IntenseDebate only works on new comments and it has some bugs (search engines also can't search through the comments but this isn't an issue for me since there are very few comments.) If anyone has any problem posting or loading the page, let me know.

I also added a Blogger custom search at the top left. The default Blogger search was terrible and I needed something better. You know you have problems when I can't find my own posts (I know the keyword is right.)

Lastly, I guess this shows how I'm not a capitalist but I really didn't want to commercialize my blog. Yet I decided to test advertising on this blog. There aren't enough readers and my goal is to improve my investing (not earn money here) so I may take it down if I think it detracts.

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