Welcome to Onlineblog 2.0, a complete overhaul of our weblog which we hope will make the site more useful, easier to use and easier on the eye. In terms of the gubbins going on in the background, it's a pretty radical change: a move from a hacked-together page created in Adobe's GoLive to a CSS (cascading style sheets) design which I have adapted from code by the remarkable Eric Costello. He has a host of templates at his site which you can copy and use for your own efforts - much kudos to him.
If you are reading in an old (pre version 5 for Internet Explorer and Netscape) this page will not look as good as current versions, but I'm afraid our stats show those older browsers account for a tiny number of visits. CSS, which works in more recent browsers, brings lots of benefits, not least better display across lots of different browsers, and different computers. We know from readers' feedback that the text size was a problem with our first effort: now you can pick your own text size, and font, using the controls in the right column. I also felt a little shabby about not including more links; now we have a list of some of our favourite weblogs, and direct searching of Google from this page, for both Onlineblog and the wider web. We'll be adding some useful resources for webloggers over the next few days - watch out for a piece in this Thursday's Online detailing some useful tools you can use for your own blog.
Finally, largely thanks to improvements at Blogger Pro, we now have proper RSS syndication, which allows you to use a variety of tools to keep an eye on the page, and be notified when we've posted something new. Why not get yourself an RSS reader and try it out - it's cool, and it makes keeping up with your roster of weblogs much easier.
In the meantime, we hope you like the changes. I'm always keen to get further feedback - my direct email is Neil dot McIntosh at Guardian dot co dot uk. Do stay tuned!
