I’m excited. Are you excited? The crinkly wrapper is coming off and it’s about dang time. Today, July 1st, after two years (and two months) of tinkering with graphics, plugins and a soupy mixture of html code, we’re launching the all new SolidSmack.
It’s shiny, don’t ya think. But that’s not all there is to it. This is a new day for what’s going on with SolidSmack as well. This is also a testbed of sort. One, to find better ways of sharing cool content with you and two, to make it more a more engaging experience for you. Here’s the details on some of the design and what’s to come.
Why the update?
Frankly, the old site layout, while minimal, was getting a bit blotchy, dated looking and difficult to manage. We just can’t have that now can we. I also wanted an easier way to add content, experiment with different web technologies on the site and yes, slap some ads up in your face to get a little support going.
The theme I’m using, and it’s versatile backend, allows me to do this and really, to do it much easier than before. This makes the site much more dynamic and able to change quickly. Some things you’ll see, some things you won’t. The point being, we’re gonna put the top down, have some fun and see what this site can do. So, you might be wondering what the site is running on.
What’s it running on?
I’m building a whole About section for the site that will give details on everything from the framework to the fonts. For the time being though, here’s some quick facts
- Hosted on Hostgator
- Running on Wordpress
- Rockin’ the Thesis Theme (aff) Framework
- Uses Icons from the free Function Icon Set
- Took over 1 year to design
What you should check out
If you’re seeing this in a feed reader or email you won’t be able to enjoy some of the features in the sidebar and footer area. So, yeah, you should definitely visit the site. There’s a few things you’ll want to come back repeatedly for.
The sidebar
Right now there’s ways to connect with me via Friendfeed. There’s polls! Delicious polls. A new one every week or so. And there’s the Disqus Combo Widget where you can see what being discussed and who’s discussing it.
The Footer
I love this area. It slides back and forth. There’s nine areas that I’ll be adding different content to occasionally. Currently, there’s ways to connect via Google Friend Connect. See some of the top CAD sites and see post by different criteria.
The Archive Page
The Archive page is where you can find posts organized by category and view post based on popularity and randomness.
Some things we’ll be trying out/looking into
Since I hold a high regard for complete randomness and highly useful information for you all, we’ll be trying out a few things.
- Real-time blog posts (Like this one, see below)
- Guest Posts (contact me if you’re interested)
- Cloud Apps
- Broader Content
- Video
As always, please let me know what you think, what’s annoying, what’s cool, what you would like to see and how the site could be better in any way. Thanks for helping SolidSmack go this far. Let’s kick it up a notch or two.
(7 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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SolidSmack is a very small behemoth of an online community about 3D CAD, technology, design, robots, and ninjas… Ok, maybe not ninjas so much, but those guys are COOL so there just might be something about some dang ninjas.
