Well... was not active much in www for some time. the reason being, trying and customizing this new layout for my blog.

But first, why new look? mmmm... i just felt that this blog has been looking the same for quite a long time. and that was the second main reason. first reason being, i felt there are few info in www, which i update (if not regularly, at least occasionally), which were just scattered in different places and there was no proper place or the info flow is missing between these. hence wanted a place, where all these are integrated and is presented in a consolidated way. hence, was checking on few themes/layouts for my blog, which serves this purpose and finally got this layout.

Then, the first challenge i faced, was with customizing this layout, for my needs. placing the details and then testing how user-friendly it is. once it reached a considerable shape, opened my testing arena to very few friends, and made changes as per their valuable feedback. few feedbacks were totally opposite of how i viewed them. so, it took a little while, to test their suggested changes, again nd again nd again nd again..., till i'm totally convinced with those changes.

Once the changes are done, next major challenge, was to make this layout compatible with different browsers. Few widgets, which work seamlessly well in one browser, was not even working/does not work the way which i wanted to. so, had to modify those widgets and scripts to work well with atleast major browsers like Firefox, Chrome and IE. this ate considerable amount of my time, to compromise on the way few widgets gets displayed across the browsers and test it extensively.

Now that, the whole layout is ready, then came my biggest challenge. The issue now was, it was taking too long time to load the page. Mainly because of the image stream at the top. i once got a comment, for my old blog, that, its taking too much time for loading. This new layout was taking triple the time it took for my old blog. i was like, this is not going to work. After few modifications to those images, without compromising the visual quality of those images, i was able to reduce considerable amount of loading time, at least 40% of what it took previously.

So, With all those modifications, changes, testing, thanks to my friends, here it is... the new layout/look of my blog, live...

I will stop this talking about some non-sense right now, with the following pics..