Blog New Look

In my prior post here, I wrote about doing a revamp of my blog layout, and I was tweaking and testing it (loading and unloading the theme, and fixing any bugs if any). I am actually writing this to take my mind of some family issues that happened recently.

I have always like those prettier layouts like The Fifth Person and Risk N Returns. In fact, it was KK from Risk N Returns that made me decide to try getting a better looking one again (from the one here).

Why not purchase a domain and install wordpress?
However, unlike quite a few bloggers, who purchased their own domain and build the website using wordpress and similar, I am trying to build a webpage on a budget, since the monetizing of this blog won't even be enough to cover the fees of purchasing the domain/subscriptions to plugins.

Blogger/Blogspot unlike Wordpress installed domains, shares Ad revenues with Google, and getting your own domain actually increases your ad revenue by 5-10 times, which is still not enough to cover the cost.


Which Free Blog Service?
So I had to get a cheap (ideally free method of revamping this blog). I considered getting a new free domain off Wordpress, but it seems even worse than Blogspot. I also considered Wix but the loading times are rather slow. I did consider getting a new domain ID from blogspot again but I guess it is quite painful typing an even longer one.

The New Name
I changed the title to something more punny - "Azrael's Financial Cents" instead of sense. Subtitle to reflect how I actually think of my money in general, "Giving Each Dollar A Job", which means to allocate as carefully and as meticulously as I deem reasonable. It is much better than a title like "The Tale of Azrael" which is a simple idea of a diary I guess, since this blog is more focused on personal finance and investing.

So I decided to find ways to get nice blogspot themes, unfortunately, Google searches for blogspot themes and various plugins and codes are virtually non-existent or antique which made it hard to implement.

Fortunately, I managed to find some old resources that help me piece everything together. I am still learning (in fact I learnt quite a bit, during my secondary school days I still remember I was terrible and unmotivated at website design).

What I have done
In short,

• Installed a new theme and edited the layout
• Added some personal tweaks such as Google fonts, and embedding Google Sheets
• Added Sitemap XML
• Modified meta tags, Robots and Robots Headers
• Added Blog to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters
• Inserted Google Analytics

I managed to roughly create a forum but that's an idea for another day.

So when I first started my blog on Wordpress years back, and made a switch to Blogspot, it looked like this:

Ver 1.0 after the switching to Blogspot

I didn't know anything about themes, so I used Blogspot's Dynamic Themes with some minor adjustments to get the look I want but seems like there are issues with the Javascript that prevents it from appearing in searches. It also was difficult to allow people to follow by email and subscribe, plus some minor UI issues. But it looked and felt much better. I added features here too.

So it became like this:

Ver 2.0 after changing to Dynamic Themes

And now this

Ver 3.1 after new theme and some tweaks

For readers, here's what some new things to look out for:

• My portfolio updates on the menu bar for ease of access
• AGMs attended on the menu bar
• My Historical Singapore Savings Bonds yield ranges for a good gauge of how cheap SSB issues are
• Useful Links on the Menu Bar, has been updated with new links including Seeking Alpha and HKEx stuff (as I am now in both US and HK in addition to SG)
• Blog label filters and searches are now there as well for easier searching of old posts
• A FB icon at the top right hand corner to go to my FB page
• There's now a box for 
• Following by email (the previous one can't work)
• Contact
• Disclaimer (the previous one can't be seen properly) 
• Blogs I am following
• Recent/Popular Posts and Comments
• A date archive dropdown box
• Share buttons (Facebook and Twitter only unfortunately)

For those of you who are quite good at stuff like this, is a piece of cake, but man was it hard for me.

Not sure what everyone thinks, perhaps some recommendations for improvements would be better as well :)

Maybe I should write a couple of post regarding my challenges, hmm.

That's all for this post.