The New Marketing Pilgrim: Fresh New Wrapper, Same Great Taste!
Saturday, October 28th, 2006;
-- Andy Beal |
And, we’re “go” for launch of Marketing Pilgim 2.0!
(If you’re reading this via RSS, you should click-thru to the site immediately and check out fresh new design).
I’m extremely excited with the new look for Marketing Pilgrim and with it comes a switch from Blogger to Wordpress. While I’ve been a loyal supporter of Google’s Blogger; too much downtime, lack of plugins and an apparent move by Blogger to focus on the Blogspot community, made it an easy decision to make the switch.
Thanks to James Mathias of Onelotus Creative for bringing his expert design skills to the project. James was fantastic to work with, very patient and able to take my scrappy photoshop mock-up and turn it into a beautiful new blog.
Along with a shiny new skin, you’ll find great new features including:
- Categories - Finally, you can filter my ramblings by category.
- Comment email notifications - Now when you comment, you’ll know if someone’s decided to pick a fight.
- Tags - Look for future posts to include tags for even better classification.
- Better Sponsorship Ads - Not only do our sponsors get the supersized 125×125 ads, but they’re also included in RSS feed ads. Let me know if you’d like to be a sponsor.
- Comment RSS - if you happen to be a comment junkie, you can even subscibe to our comments RSS feed.
While we did get advice on keeping the post URL’s identical to the Blogger format, Blogger made some recent changes which meant it didn’t work. Consequently, yours truly had to manually change close to 200 posts, to ensure they matched the old page names. If you find any 404 errors, please use the search box in the top right to find what you were looking for. If you get a 404 for a page that you think absolutely should be there, please email me.
Also, not everything will import correctly from Blogger, so you may see some quirks with any imported post.
I hope you like the new look. Please share with your friends, co-workers, social bookmarks, etc. 
Thanks for your loyal readership!
Andy
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October 28th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Andy,
Fantastic design! James hooked you up. Wordpress compared to Blogger is like a 1976 Gremlin compared to a BMW M6.
Me likey!
October 28th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Thanks Brian. Anyone looking for a great new blog design should chat to James. He’s not only talented but puts up with very demanding clients.
October 29th, 2006 at 1:57 am
Hmmm. Visions of Techcrunch.com dance in my head.
October 29th, 2006 at 3:31 am
Much better! Good design.
October 29th, 2006 at 8:35 am
looks great! I normally don’t like the three-column design, but this one looks very clean.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Nice job Andy. I don’t blame you for making the switch. I like Blogger but it is getting more “buggy” by the week. Took me an hour to post something on one of my blogs yesterday.
btw- Your feed from MyYahoo works fine.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:01 am
Thanks for the feedback.
It’s hard not to look a little like TechCrunch when you have 4 125×125 ads, but the rest of the site is unique.
October 29th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Looks sharp Andy!
October 29th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Great new look Andy.
I first wanted to say the same about the Techcrunch ads, but there’s nothing related. It’s too common to use ads in the right sidebar so ..
And Andy you have a problem with the comment box, that overlaps the right sidebar, in Firefox.
The comments box also has a font like 30px. Not like the rest of the website.
October 29th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
looks really great!
and indeed wordpress is far better than blogger (I am still using both).
October 29th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Ohh, I like it. Nice work! It’s so minty fresh!
October 29th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Ah… there’s hope. I’m also considering the same platform move from blogger to Wordpress and based on what I’m seeing here, it appears yours went pretty well. Blogger outages have been unbearable in the past 6w. Were URL redirects an issue? Glad to see it went well…
October 29th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Thanks for the feedback!
Cristian, I’m not seeing it in FF, but did just find it in IE7. Anyone else seeing the comment box overlapping in FF?
We’re working on an issue with the gravatar boxes, which should be resolved soon.
Scott - we were able to import all of the Blogger posts, but Blogger made some recent changes so we were not able to keep the same page naming. I had to change some manually and use redirects for the others.
October 29th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Gravatars are fixed now. Good job Lotus.
What remains:
#1. Reduce the width of the comment body textbox, so that it doesn’t overlap with the first of the two right sidebars.
#2. Reduce the font-size of the comment body textbox, because it’s HUGE.
Both of these in Firefox 1.5.0.7.
October 30th, 2006 at 12:50 am
Oooh, very nice, Andy. Very Web 2.0.
October 30th, 2006 at 8:54 am
Hi Cristian, I appreciate your feedback, but I’m using the same version of FF and not seeing what you are seeing. No one else has reported it either.
Anyone else seeing the comment body textbox overlapping the sidebar and 30pt text? Please leave a comment.
October 30th, 2006 at 8:58 am
You are not seeing that because this post’s comment box exceeds the sidebar’s length.
Look at this post for ex. :
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/10/google-planning-to-consolidate -account-management.html
I’ll give you a screenshot later today.
October 30th, 2006 at 10:22 am
I believe that you are seeing, but I am not. We had the overlap issue for about 5 mins after launch, but we fixed that. I’m not seeing it on any post.
Anyone else?
November 1st, 2006 at 7:01 pm
[...] Andy Beal has come up with a list of Wordpress plugins that he uses on his new wordpress run site. Most of them I know about, but there were a couple of nice surprises. In particular I plan to check out the WordPress Reports and Text Link Ads v2. Here is Andy’s list: [...]
December 11th, 2006 at 3:09 am
hi great site,thanx
April 17th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Cool site, love the template… James did a fantastic job on the layout..
Dennis