this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

I set aside some time this weekend to redesign my personal blog. I was happy with the old design, but I just figured it was time for a change. I also wanted to polish up my portfolio since times are tough right now. I wanted to open up the design a little bit and make it easier to read. I was able to accomplish this by expanding the layout to take up the entire browser window and let the content define borders in the middle of the page. The fonts are slightly bigger and should be easier to read on the white background. I added the links to the social networks I belong to at the top of the page so it’s easy to find.

I cut out a lot of the garbage on the site which I thought was unnecessary. I’m the kind of person that surfs the internet, sees something cool and figures I should add it to my site. I think a lot of people are like that. I mean look at how many Facebook apps or widgets people have in their MySpace profiles. It was time to clean things up and scale it back. Limiting the number of plug-ins helped speed up the site dramatically.

I was able to limit the site to 6 plug-ins and I’m really happy with the result. I would like to give a special thanks to a few authors. All in One SEO Pack makes things a lot easier and I implement in all my Wordpress sites. Cforms for making a solid contact form product. I would also like to thank the author of Lifestream for making an awesome product for viewing social network information. It’s a big integration of my daily routine and the plug-in is integrated to allow status showing of Brightkite, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, and Twitter.

If you have any comments or suggestions please let me know. Thanks.