If you’re reading this through a feed reader — and based on my stats, most of you are — clicking through to the site will reveal something a bit different. Truth be told, I’ve hated the look of this site for quite a while. I started planning for a change back in January, but a mix of being too busy and a touch of laziness meant that those changes were a long time in coming.

For the first time since I started blogging back in September 2002 — or rather, since I started writing online using a proper blogging system — I’ve taken the route of modifying an existing WordPress theme instead of building something from scratch. The theme in question is Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus. I wanted something simple and stark, and so used Grid Focus as the skeleton, and then stripped things down and modified it until I ended up with something I could live with. I’ll still be tweaking things over the weeks to come — and I have to say, I’m loving the simplicity of WordPress widgets — but it should at least be functioning properly. Another thing I want to do is move away from categories and start embracing tagging, which is something I should have done ages ago. I also need to clean up the old categories.

If you look at the sidebars, you’ll also notice a new logo for PauseTalk. It’s another thing I’ve been wanting to do for a long time now — I think I’ve finally overdosed on Helvetica — and the next step will be to update the PauseTalk site proper. The typeface used for the logo is Jos Buivenga’s Calluna. The main inspiration for contracting “PauseTalk” to “PSTLK” was that I wanted the ligature to appear.

This also marks the first step in some major changes I have planned with my online activities, and here’s hoping that it won’t take as long to get that project up and running as it did to update this site.