I stripped out a few personal bits, removed some ad placement blocks, and allowed the title and tagline to be edited from the WordPress administrative panel. Feel free to visit the project page to find the download as well as a few details concerning the theme.

After much deliberation, I decided to take a few minutes out of the weekend to clean-up shop here on 5thirtyone.com. I have always known that my WordPress database was a little on the high side considering how few posts I had thrown up over the past year or so.

I decided it was time to start pruning away some of the excess fat that was building up – namely, redundant comments on MySpace related posts. For some reason, readers who visit the site in search of MySpace related tutorials find it difficult to read through comments before posting their own questions. I don’t blame them. With the tutorials averaging 300+ comments, who wants to read through all that? After moving content from posts to pages, setting-up some good permanent redirects, and deleting the originals, I shaved a whopping 16MB off my WordPress database.

I’ve applied the knife to a few other posts in hopes of minimizing the outside chatter which I felt was unproductive or of little help.

Where do we go for discussions or help?

But Derek, you removed comments. You’re asking for redundant questions via email. It’s realistic to expect a flood of new emails finding their way to my inbox. No real worries as I have the necessary filters in place to thwart such an onslaught. In order to ensure that no one is left in the dark as far as locating the new posts, I’ve enabled Dan Cameron’s Search Everything plugin.

I can understand how readers might feel a little trapped with some posts & comments disappearing. For that reason, I’ve opened a bbPress powered Discussion forum – do I need to say "use it?" This will be an interesting experimental project. We all know the web is littered with options as far as WordPress themes are concerned, but how many people feel confident locating something for bbPress? With that said, consider the sharp default bbPress theme, created by Mr. Avalonstar, history as soon as I get a litte more confident with the workings of WordPress’ sister software.

Leverage the knowledge of fellow readers and the forums may transform into a worthwhile resource. That, or I’ll just play in the forums by myself. Get used to "broke" – I see no point in testing bbPress themes locally.

Final site wide updates

The final updates to hit 5thirtyone.com this weekend went into the creation of a skeleton for public downloads known as The Basket, a revised archive called the Basement, a 404 mirroring the Basement, focused re-categorization of posts, and a sponsorship area for endorsing your own. I’m actually re-considering (I know what I said last time) the use of Adsense again to cover hosting costs, in a tasteful manner [of course]. I’m still on the fence. Small advertisement experiments will drop into the site on various pages. Feel free to share your thoughts.

UPDATE #1: I’ve since updated. Feel free to see a preview of Gridded Focus on Flickr.

I spent some time today today making use of some new Moleskine Gridded Journals, a mechanical pencil, TextMate, MAMP, and Transmit to get Grid Focus from paper to front page finished product in about 12 hours. I’d like to take the time to thank the amazing Mr. Vinh for helping me realize a few important points – via email, and Mr. Watson for allowing me to use the helpful grid background. Make sure to check out Vinh Khoi’s Grid Computing and design.

I decided that it was time for a 5thirtyone.com refresh. For a number of months, I had successfully used and shared the October Special WordPress theme. Although the theme featured SEO optimization by Neil of Pronet Advertising, and a number of contextual advertisement placement opportunities, I was not content.

I wanted to be able to write – both shorts and longer entries. Due to the presentation of the theme, and my own anal-retentiveness, the layout demanded lengthy posts which matched or exceeded the height of the sidebar in order to look "balanced". Anyone who has or is using the theme will surely agree. The demand to write longer entries dissuaded me from updating the site on a regular basis – which explained the dry content periods.

So what was there to do? A full refresh. The creation of a layout that would be both forgiving and open to accepting shorter posts when laziness overcomes all that is blog-productive.

Inspired by content-rich grid focused sites such as the New York Times & Subtraction, the result is Grid Focus – a layout which imitates the background image used to aid in lining-up various elements.

Next on the blog house-cleaning list? The age-old question concerning time limited discussions (comments) on older posts. I’ve received a rather noticeable number of repeat comments on older posts due to some readers neglecting to take the time to read. I’ve contemplated this topic before, and find myself mulling over the idea again. I’ll follow-up the time-locked comments discussion with a realignment & refresh of older public themes and their distribution method(s).

Andy Budd, author of CSS Mastery & Blog Design Solutions, whipped up a pair of indispensable browser bookmarklets. Anyone who has created a website probably uses some form of a pixel grid to double check DIV element positioning and spacing during the initial structuring of a web page. Andy’s bookmarklets allow users to overlay their layouts with a transparent pixel perfect grid for positioning elements. Grab your bookmarklets from Andy Budd’s Blogography.

Discovering these bookmarklets made me question why I wasted so much time flipping between TextMate, Photoshop, and my browser(s).