KYspeaks.com with brand new look and features

Ladies and gentlemen, after weeks of design and development, the new design of this blog finally goes live yesterday.

The template is the brainchild of Haze, the awesome max designer and artist who did my wall mural too. She is, of course, also my fiancée, as some of you might have found out from facebook already.

Anyway, lets dwell a bit on this theme and allow me to showcase what has been added and how the new features could be useful to you.

1. Food Map: while there was a small food map link in the previous theme, this is now a live widget on the right sidebar
   • click on the filter (KL/PJ/Penang) will resize the map and show only those results
   • click the check box of the filter allows you to select multiple filters
   • “Show Sidebar” gives a list of results, clicking the result shows an info bubble
   • “search location/cafe” searches only the results on current map view instead of the whole database, and list of results is updated on real time in sidebar
   • zoom in/out and panning functions are supported as per google map
   • “full screen”, well, that’s self explanatory
2. Twitter feed:
   • latest tweet is displayed as default
   • “expand” button dynamically expands the tweet feed to show 5 latest tweets
   • replies are filtered out to avoid cluttering the space unncessarily
3. Food post links via thumbnail (left sidebar)
   • a list of randomly generated thumbnails linking to food posts on this blog

Other than that, the blog is also updated to the latest WordPress installation and the comment system finally supports threaded replies too. Something that was supposed to be done long ago. This allows me to reply comments via the dashboard and also WordPress for Blackberry application, not to mention it makes more sense too.

the version of the KYspeaks.com till 11th July 2010

Compared to the previous theme, this is quite a major upgrade. I didn’t want to only make the changes purely on aesthetics alone, form over function is ok, but always better when you have both right?

Over the next few days we’ll be troubleshooting the new theme a bit and make necessarily debugging/changes along the way. Let me know your feedbacks yah.