Back (to basics)

The past few weeks were difficult, but I’m glad they are over and behind me now. As you can see, I return with a new design (if you follow the blog using a feeds reader you may want to visit the site to check it out). The redesign is based on Sandbox, and it’s a throwback to the minimalism that inspired the look of Saudi Jeans in its first two years.

Longtime readers probably remember when I used to post a bunch of links to all kinds of stuff everyday. I kept doing something like this through the “shared items” on the right sidebar, but it was not exactly the same. As an experiment, I’m reintroducing the daily links in the main column of the blog with occasional context and/or commentary. However, these linky posts will not be open to comments initially. Based on how the experiment goes, this may or may not continue to be the case.

I’m mostly satisfied with the new design but it’s still kind of rough around the edges, so if you run into anything funny please let me know.

Advertisement

15 Comments

  1. Posted Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 20:13 | Permalink | Reply

    Welcome Back :)

  2. Jerry M
    Posted Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 22:34 | Permalink | Reply

    I do like the minimalist look. My only criticism is a technical one. When you open a post, no date is visible. That is fine for new posts, but not so fine for older ones (such as the best of category).

  3. Posted Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 22:37 | Permalink | Reply

    welcome back Ahmed. Your design was an inspiration and YOU are an inspiration to a lot of bloggers, including me :)

  4. Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 1:37 | Permalink | Reply

    Na3eeman! xD
    you know, you can change the banner every after a while whenever you get bored. good choices you’ve been making!

  5. Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 2:41 | Permalink | Reply

    Welcome back!

    I like this banner much better than the black on green one which didn’t provide enough of a contrast.

    I’m still not loving the brownish accent print, but it is your choice. Maybe it evokes sand?

    • Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 2:44 | Permalink | Reply

      PS I like the format of the selection of newsworthy links and agree there is no need for a comment section on them

      The Navigation section on the side bar is great!

  6. Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 5:28 | Permalink | Reply

    “Back to get wrecked, all respect to those who break they neck to keep they blogs in check”

    The above verse was from 2pac while I changed one sentence to make it seem appropriate :)

    Why no gravatars? and what about the favicon? any plans on changing that also?

    • Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 11:03 | Permalink | Reply

      Gravatars had to go for the sake of simplicity. Change the favicon? Hmmm… I didn’t think about this but will see…

  7. Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 8:25 | Permalink | Reply

    something looks so familiar about this place…wait, is that headbanner from my scrapbook? (¬‿¬)

    @Qusay,
    Let it go, man. Mnmlsm is the trend. This place is NEAT.

  8. Posted Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 13:14 | Permalink | Reply

    Welcome back :)

  9. Andrew
    Posted Saturday, February 6, 2010 at 0:52 | Permalink | Reply

    Welcome back.

  10. Posted Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 12:58 | Permalink | Reply

    Ahmed,

    Good to see your recent posts, but the discussion is a bit one-sided. I’d love to reflect on your recent swipe at KAUST, but I can’t comment on “daily archives.” Do you prefer it that way?

    -Nathan

    • Posted Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 15:46 | Permalink | Reply

      Comments may return to these posts, but for the time being I’m experimenting. You can of course respond to my short post about KAUST by writing on your blog and then linking to the post here.

  11. DW
    Posted Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 20:58 | Permalink | Reply

    middle mouse clicks that open for me links in new tabs haven’t been functioning properly on your website for a while now Ahmed.

    • Posted Monday, February 8, 2010 at 13:30 | Permalink | Reply

      Weird. But I guess it has something to do with your browser settings.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 24,226 other followers