PooterGeek is now running version 2.5.1 of WordPress and has a new theme, officially “PooterGeek 4.0”. (I’d planned this makeover long before the Harry’s Place mob moved into their nice new place and the redesign of their site was not my work, but I congratulate them on their choice of blogging software.)

Most of my readers browse PooterGeek on wider, higher contrast screens than when I last spring-cleaned so I have tried to take advantage of that, by using larger, serif fonts and paler colours to make the text easier and pleasanter to read, rather than by using the space to cram more squinty content in—blogs aren’t newspapers (though newspapers are turning into blogs). At the risk of sounding like someone on a house makeover show, my intention was to give the site an overall look that got away from all the dark panels with rounded corners fashionable on the Web these days. Let me know what you think. If you really don’t like it then scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar on the right and choose “PooterGeek 3”, PooterGeek Classic if you will, from the drop-down theme selection menu and everything will go back to the way it used to be—for you at least. [Note: depending on your Web browser, you might have to positively select “PooterGeek 4” before you can select “PooterGeek 3”.] You can always change to New PooterGeek by making the same selection from the sidebar of the old design.

If you are nerdy enough to be interested in such things, the underlying structure of PooterGeek is now, er, semantically richer, being based on Sandbox [link dead at time of writing], and is compatible with a wider range of browsers, being based on YAML. I recommend both frameworks to WordPress tweakers everywhere.

This new version of PooterGeek is, as Microsoft’s CEO recently said of Windows Vista, “a work in progress”. It’s probably buggy. Do please let me know about things that don’t work.