Version 2: "Prairie Skies"

Welcome to Version 2 of From Away titled “Prairie Skies”. I’m quite proud of this design, I was getting kind of tired of the old layout, “Antique”. The structure of the site has remained pretty much the same but there are many major improvements, even besides the new graphics.

One of the major issues I wanted to address this time around was the archival system of the site. I didn’t feel that “Antique” had an adequate method of finding old posts other than the search feature. This time around there should be no problem finding archived entries as you can browse through them by year, month, as well as category. I’ve also added archiving to my “Diversions” so that you may poke around in them since there is a lot of interesting little tidbits of information included there as well. I’ve also made use of a lot of the excellent WordPress plugins that are available. You can see a listing of the plugins I’ve used as well as links to their respective homepages in the sidebar on the “About” page.
Since I’ve began working on this layout, my knowledge of PHP has grown a significant amount due to a lot of reading I’ve been doing. As such, I’ve made use of quite a bit of PHP throughout the site, mostly with the sidebar, as well as the site header which changes according to the time of day it is here in St. Albert, Alberta, or anywhere else in the Mountain time zone for that matter.

I’ve tried to make this design very usable and stable in many browsers. One that I have not checked yet for compatibility is Opera, but that will come in time. I have a lot more improvements I intend to make. There are a number of usability issues that I still have not dealt with. Anyway, I hope that you all enjoy the new look, I know it’s a fresh change for me. Cheers.