I did a major redesign of “Stargazer’s World” yesterday and although not everything is working as it should, I am very happy with the result so far. Of course there are some minor drawbacks, like the loss of the starscape background. I tried to put it back in, but it looked a bit weird.

Ok, let’s have a look at the new features after the break then…

• Featured Posts
  There’s a javascript-powered carousel at the top of the page now that shows a few featured posts. By clicking on the small numbers you can jump directly to one of the slides and by clicking onto “Read more” you get transported to the post
• Social Widgets
  Links to my site’s Facebook page, the RSS feed, my Delicious bookmarks and Twitter now appear directly in the new theme’s sidebar to the right.
  
• Subscribe by email
  The new theme also has a nice Feedburner widget that allows you to subscribe to my blog’s posts by email instead of RSS. Just enter your email into the given text field and click subscribe. The counter left of the button shows how many people have currently subscribed to the feed (in either format).
  
• Google Ajax Search
  The Search function in the sidebar is now powered by Google and uses AJAX to directly show the results in the sidebar instead of reloading the whole page.
• RP Media Network Banner
  The new themes sidebar is luckily wide enough to allow me to add more social widgets in the future. I already added the Role Play Media Network’s banner to the sidebar. I am currently considering adding Google Friend Connect again.

Of course not everything is working as it should and there are a few things I want to add in the future. For example I had to remove the Flash-powered category cloud, because it obviously messed with the code of the theme and since I have reworked the main page from the original theme almost completely, there might still be a few kinks to work out.
I will also shorten the blogroll a bit, but I am thinking about adding a dedicated blogroll page. A lot of things are currently in planning, but I am not sure what will see fruition and what not. So please bear with me and let me know if you encounter anything that doesn’t work as it is supposed to.

Update: I actually added the blogroll page, I mused about while writing that post. You can check it out here.