I’ve spent the last month working on a new version of LibDemBlogs, most likely you are now reading this on it.

The most obvious change is the new theme, which is modified version of the Rainbow theme from Theme Lab. The old theme has been around for two years now, and didn’t actually work in IE6, so it needed replacing.

The newest feature is the Mute function, this allows you to hide/silence blogs that you don’t want to read. More info about this feature can be found in the about pages.

Some of you may have already seen the new version of the mobile site which went silently live a few weeks ago. It’s moved url to m.libdemblogs.co.uk partly because mobile phone companies shouldn’t try to adjust the layout, and also because the url is easier to type. (No need to update bookmarks as you should be redirected automatically).

On top of these front end changes the whole back end has had a refit. When I first started LibDemBlogs the project was set up to allow others to use my code, since then so many changes have been made that it got in quite a mess. For example all the blogs were stored in a text file. With only 20 blogs to edit it was quick and simple, now with a list 285 bloggers it was clearly time to move to mySQL with lovely indexes.

Now whilst I’ve had the site running in beta for a few weeks, I’m certain that something will go wrong, so please do let me know.
I hope you like the new design, but if you don’t sorry, I’m not changing it again for another few years.