New Nav Pages and Other Site Changes

I just wanted to take a moment to point out a few minor tweaks I've made to the blog layout. If you've visited any time in the last few days you may have noticed some of the changes already. 

First up is the new banner image at the top of every page. The original banner was something I made way before realizing that this blog would be entirely video game related; the new banner is a little bigger and more colorful, plus it pops a bit better, and has some video game imagery built right into it to allow newcomers to more quickly realize that the blog centers mostly around video games. I don't play a lot of retro 8-bit games, so that part may be a little misleading, but I liked the contrast that those images provided against the nebulous background.

Next up are the new main pages on the top navigation bar. The "About the Rambler" page is a more thorough biography, of sorts, going into a bit more detail about my history and background as a gamer, with a brief description of what I do when I'm not playing video games, and also explaining my thoughts on the blog itself. The "List of Games Played" page is a full list of virtually every game I've played, in chronological order, since October 30th, 2006. The entire posting history of this blog is contained in that list, but it goes back several years before I started doing reviews here. It's literally just a list, but I thought it would be fun to share, so you could see a little bit more info on what games I've played in the past.

Finally, this change is much less significant, but I changed the "Random Posts" widget in the side bar to show a preview of the article text, and reduced the number of displayed posts in the side bar from five down to four. I also tweaked the overall dimensions of the blog, making each of the side bars 20 pixels wider to allow for a slightly longer line of text before hitting a line break. This, to me, just looks more pleasing to the eye, since it prevents a single long word from dominating an entire line of space and forcing a tag (on the left) or a headline (on the right) from being displayed one word at a time down a long column.

None of these changes are very significant, of course -- I'm sure some people may not have even noticed -- but I wanted to point them out all the same (especially those two pages in the nav bar) since they kind of blend in with the basic layout. There's still one more change I want to make that I haven't done yet; I'll be detailing that in a separate post in a day or two, once it's ready to launch.