Introducing the New Look of FHNWRK

After nearly a full month of preparations, I’m happy to finally unveil the new look of The France Hopper Network. Personally, I couldn’t stand to look at the old grey any longer. When I designed the initial look, I wanted something I’d be able to look at in the ungodly hours of the night as that was often when I would be working on the site. However, it resulted in a gloomy, boring color scheme. With this new one, I hope it brightens the place up a bit.

In addition to the new color scheme, the updated UI introduces two new features I had wanted to add in for quite some time: better floating sharing buttons and a floating menu that offered quick account management, no matter what page you were currently looking at. The latter was actually partially implemented a few weeks ago with the addition of the me menu added to the navigation bar. In addition to being in the navigation bar, the me menu now floats at the bottom left of the screen.

The new floating me menu has been designed to automatically open and close on mouse over. The new floating share menu currently does not, but it is being considered. Furthermore, I am also considering having the floating share menu replace the buttons at the end of each post. For now, those buttons will remain while I gauge which set of buttons get used more. If I do decide to pull them, I’ll give a heads up notice first.

Also, with the new UI, one unused (and actually horrendously broken) feature was removed. This featured previously allowed marking up images with annotations. If I find a better plugin for it, I’ll add the feature back. On the bright side, removing the feature also means that all of its broken code has also been removed. As a result, you should get fewer errors now and a slightly faster load time.

Finally, some minor changes were made to the sidebar contents and the footer to match the new color scheme. Please do disregard the stretched out I’m Listening To list. That will automatically correct itself as usual. As always, some backend crap also got messed around with, but that you don’t have to worry about. Enjoy the new theme 😉