Rotating Banner Pictures
Time for another little poll 
This new skin that I've got going has a funky feature which not only randomises the picture at the top of the page, but allows you to have a selection of random pictures that get rotated after a period of time. At the moment, it's set to 3 images which rotate after 15 seconds of being visible and take 4 seconds to change between images.
Is this too much? Does it work? Should I keep the transition effect, or shall I just keep it as a single random image each time a page is loaded?
Edit: I've added some more pictures now. Only three are loaded for each page to keep bandwidth down, so if you're really keen you can refresh 
All of the pictures I'm uploading are of places in Australia 
A New Look
I was getting sick of the way the site was looking, so I changed it. I know I'll end up changing it again because I'll no doubt get sick of looking at the site layout as well, but for now I'm quite happy with it. It's a hacked version of a theme that I thought was nice, but I felt it needed some modifications. I'm not 100% finished yet, as I think the top of the page just looks bare. I'd like to stick an image in there, but my experiments so far have sucked so I think I'll take time out to think of how I can make it work.
So, a new coat of paint has been applied. Next, I need to finish some of the 50+ draft posts I have started and get some more discussions happening. I have quite an interesting one coming up about software users, so watch this space.
Let me know what you think of the look (if you can be arsed!).
EDIT: The picture at the top of the page is another one of my home town - Brisbane
Multi-Page Posts
As you no doubt have guessed, I can be a little verbose from time to time as I'm ranting away So I pondered the possibility of breaking up my posts across multiple pages. I installed a plugin that allows me to break the single post up into a series of pages, and I was on the verge of using it for the first time a couple of posts ago when I thought it might not be a good idea.
The issue I have with it is that it might be a deterrant to people who are reading. So I came up with a list of pros and cons during the course of investigating the options.
Pros:
- Reduces bandwidth usage - By breaking the posts up into smaller pages the amount of information I'm serving up is considerably less in the cases where people don't want to read the whole lot, or where they've already read the whole lot. This is not just good for the user who might be limited by downloads or speed, but good for me as it reduces the amount of information I serve up.
- Reduces fright - Seeing a small amount of text makes it a lot less daunting to read than being faced with one huge page of text.
- It looks cool :).
Cons:
- Readers aren't immediately aware of how much they're going to have to read.
- Can be daunting if there's a large number of pages.
That's really all I could come up with I'm leaning towards using them from now on when my posts get big, but I'm still not 100% sure. What do you guys think?
Notable
I've had a few questions from people asking me why there's a stack of queer looking icons appearing at the bottom of the blog posts, so I thought I'd post the details so that everyone knows.
The icons appear because of a plugin I recently installed called Notable. Notable is a plugin that generates links that allow for easy addition of links to various social bookmarking and networking sites. Here's a bit of a snippet from the web page:
Notable displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.This allows your users to easily submit your blog posts to these sites and increases your blog's visibility.
So it's there to help you add my blog links to a stack of different pages should you feel the need to. Like what I said and want to bookmark it on a site like del.icio.us? Click that link and away it goes. The icons that are listed are for a variety of possibly bookmarking and networking sites, and are there to try and accommodate whatever site you happen to like to use.
If you aren't into that kind of thing, then just ignore them