-Mike

I agree totally with the recent comments idea of having the actual text. I just hadn’t got round to doing it.

And thanks for at least liking something of the new design =)

1) One of the first things I notice on this page is that big red square with your RSS icon. It’s good at getting my attention, but why would I want to subscribe before I’ve even read your blog? To some people, this big splotch of red amongst the blue and black could be offensive. It would also make more sense to place it somewhere near the middle of your sidebar. As someone reads a post, they get interested, and then they see the feed icon. They don’t need to scroll back up to find it.

2) While a “Most Recent Comments” box can be a good way of showing recent activity on the site, it’s only natural that the most recent blog post would have the most recent comments on it. Because of this, your recent comments just turns into a list of redundant links to the same post. If you can, you should get a recent comments box which shows a small snippet of the actual text from the comments. Then if someone sees something interesting in a comment, they’ll want to read the rest of it and the blog entry as well.

One more thing: I like how POPULAR/COMMENTS/FEATURED and TAG CLOUD are all in the same widget.

Thank you for the business. Hope this helps!